In 1978, the founders of D.I.Y. magazine Art-Rite, Edit deAk and Mike (Walter) Robinson, collaborated with video artist Paul Dougherty in creating this eerie film and video montage for Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” in which ordinary images are suffused with dread.
“Frankie Teardrop” is a homicidal Punk epic. It’s a working-class ballad about Frankie who’s working from nine to five and can’t survive. His solution is to kill off his family and then himself. But it’s not done in an angry way. It’s done in a frustrated way so the film implies this frustration.” Edit deAk
Shards of New York in the 1970s flutter like the wings of dying birds.
A senior orthopaedic surgeon upstaged the British PM David Cameron, his Deputy, Nick Clegg and Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley, during their PR visit to Guy’s Hospital in London, earlier this week.
The doctor’s anger was caused by the camera crews and press photographers who had failed to follow hospital procedure by rolling up their sleeves during the visit.
The prime minister was quick to agree with the surgeon and told the crew he thought they should “disappear”. The hospital visit came on the day that changes to plans for the NHS were announced.
Cameron and Clegg look like two schoolboys caught up to no good behind the teacher’s back.
The always beautiful Debbie Harry talks fashion, clothes and style, before modeling a selection of Stephen Sprouse’s designs, in this interview from 1979.
Interviewer: Did you grow up around fashion?
Debbie Harry : No, not really. I grew up in New Jersey.
Sad to hear that Larry “Wild Man” Fischer died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on Wednesday at the age of 66. Fischer, a mentally ill street musician who was at one time a familiar face on the Sunset Strip selling his songs for 10 cents apiece, recorded several albums (one produced by Frank Zappa), appeared on the Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In television series, and had a documentary made about him, dErailRoaDed in 2005.
He performed with Linda Ronstadt, Tom Waits, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Rosemary Clooney, Barnes & Barnes and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo. In 2004 Fischer performed “Donkey vs. Monkeys” on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Thomas Pynchon mentions Fischer in his 2009 novel Inherent Vice on page 155.
Lawrence Wayne Fischer was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, 1944. From his youth on, whenever he was in a manic upswing — a state of intense creative energy he would call the “pep” — songs cascaded out of him.
At 16, after he threatened his mother with a knife, she had him committed to a mental institution. He was committed again a few years later.
After being released for the second time in his late teens, he lived mainly on the streets. Dreaming of becoming a famous singer, he performed in local talent shows.
He gained a small following and by the mid-1960s was opening for the soul singer Solomon Burke. He later opened for Alice Cooper, the Byrds and others.
Most of the time, though, Mr. Fischer stood on the Sunset Strip, where for a dime, or even a nickel, he would sing for passers-by. Mr. Zappa discovered him there and in 1968 released “An Evening With Wild Man Fischer” on his label Bizarre Records.
Mr. Fischer eventually fell out with Mr. Zappa, as he did with nearly everyone in his orbit. He languished until the mid-1970s, when he was almost single-handedly responsible for the birth of Rhino Records.
Rhino had been a record store in Los Angeles; Mr. Fischer, a habitué, recorded a promotional single, “Go to Rhino Records,” in 1975. Demand for it proved so great that it catapulted the store’s owners into the record-producing business.
I ran into “Wild Man” Fischer quite a few times over the years. The first time I saw him was on the third day I spent in Los Angeles in 1991. I didn’t have a car and so I took a bus to Tower Records. When I was going back to the hotel, I was sitting at the bus stop and a homeless vagrant started to get menacing towards me. It took me about a split second to realize who was confronting me and I thought it was probably a good idea to get away from him FAST, so I walked to the next bus stop. Sometimes you’d see him outside of rock clubs on Sunset or in the parking lot of the liquor store near the Chateau Marmont.
The last time I saw him was in 2004. My cell phone had run out of juice and I was making a call from a pay phone outside of a 7-Eleven store on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood. As the line was ringing, I saw a stream of urine roll past me. I followed it to its place of origin and there I saw an unconscious Larry “Wild Man” Fischer pissing himself. When I saw the dErailRoaDed movie a few years ago, I realized that when I saw him, that this was at a time (shown in the film) when none of his family even knew where he was for several months. May he rest in peace.
This Sunday night at 9p.m. on the USA network crime drama Law & Order: Criminal Intent, poet/rocker Patti Smith makes her acting debut. Smith will portray a Columbia University mythology professor. It was actor Vincent D’Onofrio’s idea to cast Smith in the role.
Titled “Icarus,” the episode, which also features guest star Cynthia Nixon, concerns the investigation of a Broadway musical after an actor dies on stage while performing a stunt. (Can you say, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”?)
“I’ve never really acted, but I highly respect the craft,” says Smith. “I knew that it wasn’t going to be simple, but it was a little more daunting than I expected.”
I can’t embed it, but if you’d like a quick look at Smith’s performance, click here.
Below, a terrific live “Horses” on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1976:
Kicking off with “Rockaway Beach” this is The Ramones performing live on the classic German TV show Musikladen, in a special recorded on September 13 1978, in Bremen.
Track listing:
“Rockaway Beach”
“Teenage Lobotomy”
“Blitzkrieg Bop”
“I Don’t Want You”
“Go Mental”
“Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment”
“You’re Gonna Kill that Girl”
“Don’t Come Close”
“I Don’t Care”
“She’s the One”
“Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”
“Havana Affair”
“Commando”
“Needles & Pins”
“Surfin’ Bird”
“Cretin Hop”
“Listen to My Heart”
“California Sun”
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”
“Pinhead”
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”
“We’re the skate witches and we don’t take NO crap from NO one.”
Punk rock auteur, Danny Plotnick shot his YouTube classic “Skate Witches” in one afternoon in 1986 on Super 8 film at a cost of $60. In it, a group of teenage female skatepunks (and their pet rats) terrorize boy skaters.
Reiss: So, are the Skate Witches still around?
Jenny Parker:…Hmm?
Are the Skate Witches-
Noooooooo…no. We haven’t talked since Slutty Sarah slept with my boyfriend at prom.
You guys went to prom? I figured that would be the last place you’d go to in High School.
Yeah, I mean, we were going TP the parking lot while everyone was dancing in the gym. Sarah and David lived on the same side of town so they came together. When I showed up they were screwing in David’s car.
Harsh. And that was the end of the Skate Witches?
Sorta. I had to repeat senior year. They graduated and moved on and I had to stay behind. It was a rough year.
I bet.
I mean I caught those bastards cheating on me, and my rat died. It was a lot of stress no wonder I failed.
What was your rat’s name?
Willow. She was my best friend. I accidently sat on her.
RightWingWatch put together this collection of hate-filled homo/Islamaphobe Bryan Fischer’s greatest shit. It’s revolting stuff, a nasty little man taunting people and trying to be provocative. How stupid his listeners must be! Can you imagine listening to this day after day?
If Fischer got hit by a bus and died, the country would be better off. I just hope he’s crossing the street with his buddy Tony Perkins when it happens!
Beloved cartoonist Charles Schulz received this unsigned letter dated November 12, 1969 concerning the new addition of “Franklin,” the first black character appearing in “Peanuts.” How strange this seems now, but just imagine the uproar on FOX News if a gay kid was added to the gang today.
United Feature Syndicate
220 East 42nd Street
New York, N.Y. 10017
Gentlemen:
In today’s “Peanuts” comic strip Negro and white children are portrayed together in school.
School integration is a sensitive subject here, particularly at this time when our city and county schools are under court order for massive compulsory race mixing.
We would appreciate it if future “Peanuts” strips did not have this type of content.
Here’s something exceedingly cute for a Friday - Hooray, tiny animals, a delightful Tumblr blog full of pictures of big hands with tiny little animals. Sweet.
As I’ve admitted on this blog before, I was a teenage Ayn Rand fanatic. I owned all of her books, cassette tapes of her lectures and every single issue of The Objectivist, The Objectivist Newsletter and The Ayn Rand Letter. I’m not exactly proud of this fact, but what can I do? Thankfully it didn’t take me that long to outgrow this nonsense, but for good or ill, I still to this day have a pretty good working knowledge of her philosophy and life’s work.
This morning it popped into my head, appropos of nothing, how much Ayn Rand railed against Ronald Reagan before she died and I recalled one particular essay from one of the final issues of The Ayn Rand Letter where she asked her readers not to support Reagan and instead to vote for Gerald Ford, who Reagan was challenging for the GOP nomination at the time (and who appointed her loyal apostle and acolyte, Alan Greenspan, to his position as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board).
I’m guessing that a lot of Republican Ayn Rand fans—maybe this will be news to Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Rand Paul—probably don’t realize that their hero had such a dim view of The Gipper…
From The Ayn Rand Letter, Volume IV, Number 2, November-December 1975:
Now I want to give you a brief indication of the kinds of issues that are coming up, on which you might want to know my views.
1. The Presidential election of 1976. I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. I urge you not to work for or advocate his nomination, and not to vote for him. My reasons are as follows: Mr. Reagan is not a champion of capitalism, but a conservative in the worst sense of that word—i.e., an advocate of a mixed economy with government controls slanted in favor of business rather than labor (which, philosophically, is as untenable a position as one could choose—see Fred Kinnan in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 541-2). This description applies in various degrees to most Republican politicians, but most of them preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: he opposes the right to abortion.
From Rand’s final public speech, “Sanction of the Victims,” delivered November 21, 1981:
In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don’t think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called “Moral Majority” and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.
The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.
Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.
If you know any conservative Republican Ayn Rand fans, you should forward this post to them, just to annoy ‘em.
Daniel Kornrumpf‘s embroidered portraits on linen are truly unbelievable. His work is reminiscent of the great Chuck Close, but employing such unorthodox materials. I’m blown away by the detail in his stitches and the way he’s able to mimic brush strokes.
I wonder how long it takes him to make one of these?
More of Daniel Kornrumpf’s portraits after the jump…
Timothy Leary with Boing Boing founders Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair at Golden Apple Comics. Photo: Richard Metzger
At some point in 1995, I was visiting Dr. Timothy Leary in his home in Benedict Canyon. I showed up at the appointed time and waited outside on the patio.
And I waited. And waited. And waited and waited and waited. After about an hour and 45 minutes—the guy was one of my greatest heroes, how long are you supposed to wait in a situation like that?—I made to leave when Tim finally arrived. It had been some time, maybe five years, since I had seen him last and he looked terrible. Until recently Leary could have passed for a man 20 years younger, but now he looked just awful. It was the week before he told the media that he had terminal cancer.
That day, a delivery of several boxes of items which had been confiscated during one of his many drug busts of the sixties, had arrived at the house. There were several people in the housre cataloging the contents (one of them was Bill Daily, the antiquarian book dealer here in Los Angeles and I think former SNL comedy writer Tom Davis might have been there, too).
One item had the group on stitches when it was discovered: A tin flour container (my grandmother owned the exact same one) full of flour. It was surmised by the group that whoever grabbed it must have suspected the flour jar was where the cocaine was hidden. I recall Leary quipping “I wonder where they thought we kept our flour?”
When the Harvard psychologist and psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary first met the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1960, he welcomed Ginsberg’s participation in the drug experiments he was conducting at the university.
Multimedia
“The first time I took psilocybin — 10 pills — was in the fireside social setting in Cambridge,” Ginsberg wrote in a blow-by-blow description of his experience taking synthesized hallucinogenic mushrooms at Leary’s stately home. At one point Ginsberg, naked and nauseated, began to feel scared, but then “Professor Leary came into my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great man.”
Ginsberg’s “session record,” composed for Leary’s research, was in one of the 335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs and more that the New York Public Library is planning to announce that it has purchased from the Leary estate. The material documents the evolution of the tweedy middle-aged academic into a drug guru, international outlaw, gubernatorial candidate, computer software designer and progenitor of the Me Decade’s self-absorbed interest in self-help.
The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 months, as the library organizes the papers. A preview of the collection, however, reveals a rich record not only of Leary’s tumultuous life but also of the lives of many significant cultural figures in the ’60, ’70s and ’80s.
Robert Greenfield, who combed through the archive when it was kept in California, for his 2007 biography of Leary, said: “It is a unique firsthand archive of the 1960s. Leary was at the epicenter of what was going on back then, and some of the stuff in there is extraordinary.”
Leary, who died in 1996, coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and was labeled by Richard M. Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” He was present in Zelig-like fashion at some of the era’s epochal events. Thousands of letters and papers from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and even Cary Grant — an enthusiastic LSD user — are in the boxes.
In May/June of 1981, The Clash were booked to play at the curiously named “Bond’s International Casino” (it was a former low-rent clothing store) in New York City in support of the sprawling 3-record Sandinista! album. They were meant to play just eight gigs in the smallish Times Square space, but the performances were dangerously oversold by greedy promoters. Fire marshals and the NY Building Department closed down both of the May 30th concerts, but the band vowed to honor every last ticket and the number of shows was extended to seventeen, with matinee and evening performances added.
The Clash’s Bond’s Casino shows became a part of the rebel band’s legend and featured opening acts like The Fall, The Dead Kennedys, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Treacherous Three, KRAUT, Funkapolitan (who opened for The Clash when I saw them the following year), The Slits, ESG, Bad Brains, The Bloods, The Sugerhill Gang, their pal from Texas, Joe Ely and others.
One of the shows, on June 9th, was professionally recorded for an FM radio broadcast and widely bootlegged. You can easily find it and other Bond’s shows on audio blogs.
Not a lot of footage exists from the Clash’s legendary Bond’s Casino residency, apparently not even one complete show was shot, but there were some tantalizing clips in Don Letts’ Grammy-winning Westway to the World rock doc (released in 2000), as well as in the abandoned short “The Clash on Broadway” (on Westway as a DVD extra). Sadly the sound quality is not great, so the performances lacked the hinted at oomph they should have had. Letts’ Bonds footage was apparently shot on the same day as the FM recording was made. Luckily an enterprising Clash fan has restriped the stereo audio from that source and synced up some other angles found in various places. The results are probably the best glimpse we have at what went on at these shows. Ain’t the Internet great?
If you were at the Bond’s shows, there is a Facebook group called “I Saw the Clash at Bonds” (which I notice that our Marc Campbell is a part of, along with DM pals Douglas Hovey and Mirgun Akyavas). Dozens of personal accounts of the shows can be found in several places, just Google it.
First up, a blistering “Safe European Home.” I love how “the only band that matters” walk onstage like a street gang to the spaghetti-western sounds of Ennio Morricone’s “6 Seconds To Watch” (from the soundtrack to For A Few Dollars More). What band today could pull off swagger like that and not look like complete dickheads? None of them, that’s who…
An absolutely scorching “This is Radio Clash” (probably—no definitely—my #1 favorite Clash number). Turn it up!
