In what has to be the worst timing ever, the strip that runs in today’s paper seems to be making a statement about Veterans. It absolutely, positively has nothing to do with this important day of remembrance.
Regarding today’s Garfield comic strip , it was written almost a year ago and I had no idea when writing it that it would appear today—of all days. I do not use a calendar that lists holidays and other notable days so when this strip was put in the queue, I had no idea it would run on Veterans Day. What are the odds? You can bet I’ll have a calendar that lists everything by my side in the future.
My brother Dave served in Vietnam. My son James is a Marine who has had two tours of duty, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. You’d have to go a long way to find someone who was more proud and grateful for what our Veterans have done for all of us.
Please accept my apologies for any offense today’s Garfield may have created. It was unintentional and regrettable.
Dangerous Minds pal Deborah Vankin published a terrific interview with the great Robert Crumb on the Los Angeles Times’ Hero Complex blog today. Of particular note, the part where the expat artist discusses coming home and how he feels about American culture these days:
Deborah Vankin: You left the U.S. 19 years ago — how’s life in France?
Crumb: It’s good, life is good here. Good quality of life. All I can say is: You can keep Los Angeles. No, seriously, what’s not to like? You’re not constantly bombarded … there’s some room to breathe from that constant corporate propaganda that America is saturated with. You don’t know how saturated you are with that. Here it’s not to the degree that it is there. They resisted. The French hold onto their traditions. I was always so alienated in America. My work was this constant reaction to that. And I don’t have that here. So it’s different.
Deborah Vankin: That must have some influence on your work.
Crumb: Yeah, probably. I couldn’t characterize exactly how, but I’m sure it has. Maybe I’m less angry. I don’t know. Actually, I’m not less angry. When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got – you have no idea how pervasive it is there. The public relations and propaganda put out by the corporate mono-culture there is so pervasive. When I’m over here, I look at America and think,‘Why are people not more angry about what’s going on? Why are the people not more up in arms?’ I mean the banks and all that stuff? Good God. How can they stand it? The thing about the corporate approach is it’s smart and it knows how to distract people really well with entertainment. It doesn’t just take, it gives back in this smarmy way… they give you this seemingly McDonald’s version of the good life which is completely phony and fake, from top to bottom. It pacifies the people.
Read more: R. Crumb on greed, senior sex and life in France: ‘I’m a lot less angry’ (Los Angeles Times)
Princess Hijab is a graffiti artist who daubs hijabs and burkas on advertising posters in the Paris Metro, as today’s Guardian reports:
Princess (Hijab)winds through the corridors of Havre-Caumartin sizing up the advertising posters lining the walls. She has agreed to meet as she scours stations for targets for her next “niqab intervention”. In Spandex tights, shorts and a hoodie, with a long black wig totally obscuring her face, one thing is clear; the twentysomething doesn’t wear the niqab that has become her own signature. She won’t say if she’s a Muslim. In fact, it’s more than likely that Princess Hijab isn’t even a woman. There’s a low note in her laughter, a slight broadness to her shoulders. But the androgynous figure in black won’t confirm a gender. “The real identity behind Princess Hijab is of no importance,” says the husky voice behind the wig. “The imagined self has taken the foreground, and anyway it’s an artistic choice.”
“I started doing this when I was 17,” she says (I’ll stick to “she” as the character is female, even if the person behind it is perhaps not).
“I’d been working on veils, making Spandex outfits that enveloped bodies, more classic art than fashion. And I’d been drawing veiled women on skate-boards and other graphic pieces, when I felt I wanted to confront the outside world. I’d read Naomi Klein’s No Logo and it inspired me to risk intervening in public places, targeting advertising.”
The Princess’s first graffiti veil was in 2006, the “niqabisation” of the album poster of France’s most famous female rapper, Diam’s, who by strange coincidence has now converted to Islam herself. “It’s intriguing because she’s now wearing the veil,” the Princess muses. Intially she graffitied men, women and children and then would stand around to gauge the public’s response; now she does hit-and-runs. “I don’t care about people’s reactions. I can see this makes people feel awkward and ill at ease, I can understand that, you’re on your way home after a tough day and suddenly you’re confronted with this.”
The Cure‘s majestic Robert Smith has recorded vocals for Canadian duo Crystal Castle’s ‘Not in Love’ taken from their self-titled second album. The track is released on 6 December 2010 on Fiction Records - the perfect antidote to the ghastly ‘X-Factor’.
Don Lane was born in Manhattan, became a Vegas entertainer and ended up hosting a talk show in Australia. It’s a long story worth telling… but not now. We’ll just jump right into these segments from Don’s Aussie show and Tom Waits’s appearances on them, which are quite entertaining. Lane is a gracious host who seems to be genuinely interested in Tom’s beat personae, which is about as real as the Charles Bukowski house slippers I almost bought on eBay.
Tom’s schtick, and it is schtick, is performance art of a very high caliber. And I enjoy it. But, having interviewed Waits in the mid-70s in Denver I know his skidrow, Raymond Chandleresque posturing was part of a deliberate process of creating a character, kind of like a hard-edged literary Pee Wee Herman.
In our meeting, Waits had mistakenly pegged me for a young college kid working for a college paper. Yes, I wrote freelance for a college paper, but I was a high school dropout that had grown up around some heavy weight poets in the Washington D.C. area, cats who had introduced me to the beat poets and the king of the bards of the backalleys Bukowski. Waits was laying his Waits trip on me and I was going along for the ride. But, when I mentioned Bukowski’s name, Waits’s attitude changed. Bukowski was not the superstar then as he is now. Tom wasn’t ready to be outed as a Bukowski imitator. I nailed Waits to the wall with my Bukowski rap. I basically told Tom that I felt his streetwise, hipster hobo thang was something he had picked up from Bukowski, which he did not deny. He seemed surprised that I knew who Bukowski was and had identified Bukowski’s style in his own. Waits had spent time with Bukowski and certainly seemed to me to have picked up some of Bukowski’s traits, from the way he held his cigarettes to the low growl in his voice.
As I continued to discuss my take on his act, Waits slowly worked himself out of character and got real. His voice became less gruff, his body language changed from a guy who had taken a few too many punches to an alert intellectual who had read a few too many books. He relaxed and shared with me his actual past: suburban upbringing under the guidance of parents who were school teachers, one of whom taught English. None of this changed my mind about Waits’s art. His lyrical gifts and musical genius stand tall in my mind. But, the Tom Waits we see on stage is a character created by the Tom Waits we don’t see. And maybe none of that matters. But, I did enjoy the soft spoken young cat who dropped his guard for a few minutes in the lounge of a seedy hotel in Denver. A lounge that the puppetmaster Waits had chosen deliberately for dramatic effect. Yes, it’s showmanship. But I always believed that the beats were about getting down to the realness of shit. I wasn’t prepared for the Monkees version of bohemia.
Enjoy the Tom Waits we love in these episodes of The Don Lane Show broadcast in 1979 and 1981.
Acclaimed British journalist and punk historian Jon Savage has curated Black Hole: Californian Punk 1977-1980, a unique and revealing compilation of the Golden State’s hugely diverse pre-thrash punk scene that gets released November 15th.
That seems strange on the surface. Strange that it’s both taken this long into the 21st-century American punk revival and reissue era for such a quality collection to emerge, and that it’s taken an Englishman rather than a Californian to do it. But this particular Englishman is more than qualified. As noted in his recent interview in the Quietus, Savage hepped up to the scene while on the West Coast in 1978 as a journalist for Sounds magazine, hanging with the likes of the Screamers and the Avengers and confirming to himself and others that the UK didn’t own punk.
Savage’s inclusion of both Northern and Southern Cali bands like the Bags, the Alley Cats, the Weirdos, Black Randy & the Metro Squad, and the Dils makes Black Hole most resemble the compilations released by the legendary short-lived L.A.-based Dangerhouse label run by Pat “Rand” Garrett and David Brown from 1978 to 1980. But Savage augments those with a range of others, from superstars like the Dead Kennedys to second-tiers like Crime, Middle Class and the Sleepers, and on to important obscurities like the two-single-releasing Aurora Pushups.
One of Savage’s rationales surrounding the comp, on which he expounds in Quietus, proves striking:
I don’t like hardcore. It’s too ‘boy’ for me. I was into the idea of punk being made for and by outsiders. And that meant outsiders of every hue, and that meant weird boys, hopeless boys, strong women, and gay men and women. As soon as it starts to get a machismo, and this happened in UK punk, too – I’m out of there.
Black Hole will join Penelope Spheeris’s classic late-‘70s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization as primary documents of a rough and energetic multi-city underground music scene—one that reflected the social dysfunction of the state in political schizophrenia with the world’s eighth-biggest economy.
Here’s the title track by the Urinals. This is Cali.
In addition to being a smashing songwriter, singer and memoirist, Julian Cope has spent the past 20 years exploring and documenting Britain’s megalithic heritage: monuments, stone circles, hill forts and barrows. In this documentary made for the BBC, we follow Cope on his journey into the geography of the mystic, a place of ceremony and magic.
The documentary is a companion piece to Cope’s splendid, sadly out-of-print, 1998 book ‘The Modern Antiquarian’. Fortunately, for those of us interested in sacred places he curates a website and you can find it here.
Since launching in March 2000ce, the site has grown to be a massive resource for news, information, images, folklore & weblinks on the ancient sites across the UK, Ireland and Europe.
Sigue Sigue Sputnik performing ‘Success’ with a bunch of cheerleaders on Brazilian TV in 1988. When I saw SSS in NYC they had a great stage show, but no cheerleaders.
Danzig cancelled a Minneapolis gig at the last moment on Tuesday night because the venue where he was booked didn’t have high enough ceilings. Shit, considering Glenn is only a few inches taller than your average dwarf, those ceilings must have been really really low. Danzig’s star tripping cost the Cabooze club and its employees some serious revenue. According to reports, the former Misfit was a major pain in the ass.
Last night Danzig, sourpuss extraordinaire, was scheduled to appear at the Cabooze in support of his new record, Deth Red Sabaoth, that no one’s heard of. Looks like it will probably stay that way, at least around the Twin Cities.
A spokesperson for the club said…
He walked off the show before we even opened the doors. They picked him up around noonish, he was pretty bitter then. Then it just went from bad to worse, idle threats, and then finally he just said “fuck it, I’m outta here.”
It is surprising to think that fifty years ago today, D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published and sold legally in British bookshops for the very first time.
The initial print run of 200,000 sold out, and within a year a total of 2m copies were sold, outselling the Bible. As was reported by the BBC at the time:
London’s largest bookstore, W&G Foyle Ltd, said its 300 copies had gone in just 15 minutes and it had taken orders for 3,000 more copies. When the shop opened this morning there were 400 people - mostly men - waiting to buy the unexpurgated version of the book.
Hatchards in Piccadilly sold out in 40 minutes and also had hundreds of orders pending.
Selfridges sold 250 copies in minutes. A spokesman told the Times newspaper, “It’s bedlam here. We could have sold 10,000 copies if we had had them.”
Lady C, as it has become known, has also become a bestseller in the Midlands and the North where demand has been described as “terrific”.
Originally published in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been banned in the UK on grounds of obscenity, though a limited, expurgated and heavily censored imported version had been available, where words, such as ‘penis’ were replaced by ‘liver’, and sections of sexually explicit “purple prose” removed.
All this was to change, when in 1959, the Obscene Publications Act stated that any book considered obscene by some but could be shown to have “redeeming social merit” might still published. This encouraged Penguin Books to prepare 200,000 unexpurgated copies of Lady C for release in 1960 (to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of Lawrence’s death), in a bid to test the novel’s merit against the Act. This led to a now infamous trial in October 1960, where a host of established authors lined-up to give evidence in defense of the Lawrence’s novel, including T. S. Eliot, Doris Lessing, Aldous Huxley, Dame Rebecca West. Defense lawyer, Michael Rubinstein had cleverly contacted over 300 potential witnesses, ranging from writers, journalists, teachers, politicians, academics, TV celebrities and theologians. Many writers wrote letters in support to Rubinstein including:
E. M. Forster wrote:
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a literary work of importance, written by a leading 20th-century novelist. It is surprising that such a work should be prosecuted here, and if it is condemned, our country will certainly make itself look ridiculous in America and elsewhere.
I do not think that it could be held obscene, but am in a difficulty here, for the reason that I have never been able to follow the legal definition of obscenity. The law tells me that obscenity may deprave and corrupt, but as far as I know, it offers no definition of depravity or corruption.
I am certain that it is neither erotic nor pornographic, nor, from what I knew of the author, would there have been any erotic or pornographic intention in his mind.’
Graham Greene, August 22 1960:
‘It seems to me to be absurd that this book should ever have been classed as obscene and I should say that its tendency as Lawrence intended is to treat the sexual side of a love affair in an adult fashion. I can’t Imagine that even a minor could draw any other conclusion from the book than that sexual activity was at least enjoyable.
I am myself dubious how far Lawrence was successful in his intention. I find some parts of the book rather absurd and for that reason I would prefer not to be called as a witness in case I was forced into any admission harmful to the Penguin case.
Yours faithfully
Graham Greene’
Aldous Huxley, October 9 1960:
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an essentially wholesome book. Its treatment of sex is at once matter-of-fact and lyrical. There is no prurience in it and no trace of that sadistic perversion which is such an odious feature of many popular novels and short stories that, because their authors prudently avoid the use of certain four-letter words, are permitted to circulate freely.
That a beautiful and serious work of art should run the risk of being banned because its creator (for aesthetic and psychological reasons into which I need not enter) chose to make use of certain words that it is conventional to regard as shocking – this surely is the height of absurdity.
Aldous Huxley’
Evelyn Waugh, August 21 1960:
‘Your MBR/VS of 18th. I have not read Lady Chatterley’s Lover since it first came out. My memory of it is that it was dull, absurd in places and pretentious. I am sure that most of its readers would be attracted by its eroticism. Whether it can “corrupt” them, I can’t tell, but I am quite certain that no public or private “good” would be served by its publication. Lawrence had very meagre literary gifts.
Kindest regards,
E.W.’
Not everyone was happy about supporting the book, Doris Lessing wrote: “I don’t think this novel is one of Lawrence’s best, or a great work of art, I’m sorry, if there is to be a test case, that it will be fought over this particular book.” Likewise, Iris Murdoch tempered her support with “Lady Chatterley’s Lover certainly may strike one as an eminently silly book by a great man.”
Surprisingly, support came from unlikely sources, the Bishop of Woolwich supplied a written deposition, which stated:
‘Archbishop William Temple once said that Christians do not make jokes about sex for the same reason that they do not make jokes about Holy Communion – not because it is dirty, but because it is sacred.
‘Lawrence did not share the Christian valuation of sex, but he was always straining to portray it as something sacred, in a real sense as an act of Holy Communion. I believe that Christians in particular should read this book, if only because Lawrence believed passionately, and with much justification, that they have killed and denied the natural goodness of creation at this point.’
The trial lasted 6 days and marked the demise of one generation, and the arrival of another. This was most notable when the Prosecuting Counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones asked:
“Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”
If there was a line that negatively affected the Prosecution’s case then this was it. For it revealed Griffith-Jones lived in an archaic and class-divided world where everyone apparently had servants; a world separate from that of wives and servants, and this the majority of Britons. It was the clearest picture of the two worlds that existed back then - the world of “class, rank and privilege, ranged against ordinary people.”
Griffith-Jones’ comment highlighted this divide, and re-enforced the notion Penguin was on the side of “the common man.” In his closing speech, defense lawyer, Gerald Gardiner said:
“I do not want to upset the prosecution by suggesting that there are a certain number of people nowadays who as a matter of fact don’t have servants. But of course that whole attitude is one which Penguin Books was formed to fight against, which they have always fought against…
“Isn’t everybody, whether earning £10 a week or £20 a week, equally interested in the society in which we live, in the problems of human relationships including sexual relationships? In view of the reference made to wives, aren’t women equally interested in human relations, including sexual relations?”
Penguin’s success was a victory for all publishers, and the release of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on November 10 1960, marked the start of the cultural and political change that defined the decade.
Illinois Rep. John Shimkus—candidate for chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee—is sure that climate change is no big whup. How does he know this? The Bible tells him so: God promises Noah he’ll never again destroy the earth and all living things. Whew! We’re all safe! Even us unbelievers!
Progress Illinois gives more reasons why Shimkus, of course a Republican, is probably not the best man for the job:
During a discussion at a hearing about the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that greenhouse gases threaten public health and the environment, Shimkus noted that carbon dioxide is a natural result of breathing and asked, “Does EPA propose we stop breathing?” (They do not.) At a dinner held by the Sangamon County Republicans in February, Shimkus suggested that the sight of farmers “ice-fishing on ponds in Southern Illinois” is the latest evidence that global warming is a “hoax.” Oh, and let’s not forget the time Shimkus expressed fear that curbing carbon emissions would “take away plant food.” (Scientists disagree.)
This idiot should be pointed at and laughed at. Instead we elect ignoramuses like this to Congress! We’re doomed!
The restored digital 4K version of Dr. Strangelove will be screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin November 15-18. The Alamo has installed a new 4K projection system and the results are awesome. I saw The Bridge On The River Kwai in a 4K presentation this past Monday and it was stunning. 4K is a 10 megapixel image with a native resolution of 4,096 x 2,400—more than four times the resolution of HD. If your local theater has a 4K system (they’re not cheap) and you have a chance to see a newly restored classic in that format, go for it. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly will be screening at the Alamo later this month also in a 4K restored version and in its original aspect ratio. The flies, the sweat, the squinting eyes, the dust, the nostrils…all digitally restored. I can’t wait.
Watching the restored The Bridge On The River Kwai was a reminder of just how breathtakingly beautiful technicolor films can be when presented in pristine condition. While the digital presentation is not quite the same as celluloid, I still felt I was viewing the film in all of its original splendor (I saw the film as a child and remember it well). The color, detail, depth of field were all enhanced and take on an almost lysergic clarity. And there’s still some grain. Simply gorgeous. Apart from the beauty of the film, the story is powerfully anti-war. Even as a child, I picked up on that. I’m quite sure that my father, a Naval officer, took me to the film expecting a patriotic message. Little did he know.
I’m hoping that this new 4K technology and the digital restoration of classic films introduces them to a new audience. There’s nothing like seeing a widescreen David Lean or Sergio Leone movie on the big screen, nothing.
Alan on Youtube has taken the ‘Strawberry Fields’ episode of the Beatles cartoon television series and added a stereo mix of the song to the video. Quite nice.
From 1967, with the song dubbed in a new stereo remix I made to expand the orchestral section! (...unlike the newly remastered “Magical Mystery Tour” CD!) This episode was inspired by the fact that the “Strawberry Field” of the song had been based on a real-life Salvation Army orphanage in Liverpool. When the Beatles stop by a dilapidated orphanage, the hostile attitude of the children (who are drawn in muted colors like the downtrodden Pepperlanders in “Yellow Submarine”) is explained by the Beatles’ driver, James, as being being due to their “sociological environment”. So the Beatles set about to create an Elysian playground with song! John’s “Musketeer Gripweed”, of his film “How I Won the War”, has a cameo!
