The only time (I believe) that Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band played on national television was on Saturday Night Live. I remember seeing that performance with my mother when it played live. Understandably, she thought they were terrible…but that’s beside the point.
Most people did.
Apparenly You Tube (or NBC) has taken down that old Beefheart clip
As a public service I resurrect it here! (though you’ll need to have Real Player to see it).
It looks best at 2X, not full screen.
My neighbors (behind us) are having a big party with their big soundsystem and woefully frozen musical tastes (why do so many people stop searching out music beyond their high school days)? That’s the case with these hosts.
I suppose it could be worse. At least it’s Cabaret Voltaire and not Lynyrd Skynyrd!
That got me thinking about videos of that era…
Here is one shot in Super 8 (from the German band Malaria) which would be so easy to recreate in a computer now but think about what went into making it in the early 1980′s. It’s pretty amazing that it works.
I just rewatched this 2004 BBC documentary about the ‘Bush Years’ (among many, many other things). It’s not a ‘conspiracy movie’ but rather more of a history lesson about the failure of sixties liberalism and what powers gained within the void that surfaced in the post-communist, post-ideological world.
The episode on Afghanistan was sobering to say the least.
Watch the trailer here.
Watch the whole show here.
**Mina almost invisible**
PLUS: what it would be like if The Melvins scored classic John Woo films!
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THREE NEW SONGS:
marnie stern transformer (from This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That, 2008)
harvey milk barnburner (from Life…The Best Game In Town, 2008)
mogwai batcat (from A Hawk Is Howling, 2008)
“There wasn’t a Dunedin Sound, except that the bands recorded on the same equipment and possessed the same feel. We all shared a love of good songs and a loathing of stage personas and such.”
Martin Phillips (The Chills)
Having just come off of seeing David Kilgour last week…stumbling upon this Flying Nun documentary made me all warm and fuzzy.
See it in 9 Parts:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation“
Plato
On Saturday…we (Brian and Amanda) quickly watched two guys play somewhat conventional and unfashionable pop music.
Live they were both OK but nothing terribly exciting.
Next Saturday though, Amanda is playing with her “noise band” (which I’d like to see) but also on the same night is Tinariwen at the Temple Bar and the Tiger Lillies at UCLA so…I guess I’m going to be a bad boyfriend.
Today, I am offering up some video of far weirder, experimental bands you might never find (or want to find, for that matter). Though, Mr. Lif ain’t weird at all.
After posting about 50 links to good videos from 2007′s better records on Facebook I realized that blog readers were going to be out of the loop.
So, as a corrective, I offer up 20 videos for your enjoyment:
Land Of Talk Speak To Me Bones
Field Music She Can Do What She Wants
Field Music A House Is Not A Home
Justice D.A.N.C.E.Â
Deerhunter Strange Lights
Animal Collective Peacebone
The Field Over The Ice
Maximo Park Our VelocityÂ
Feist I Feel It All
Kevin Drew Backed Out Of The …
The Magic Numbers Take A Chance
Art Brut Direct Hit
Future Of The Left adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood
The Go! Team Grip Like A Vice
Bat For Lashes What’s A Girl To Do?
El-P Smithereens
Caribou Melody Day
Battles Atlas
Great Northern HomeÂ
Electrelane To The East
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubtâ€. Bertrand Russell
Perhaps a revision of Russell’s original observation is in order.
Click the picture, and be amazed!
Perhaps now I know why the French loved this guy so much.
“While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.” Mark Twain
So, I’m kinda down on Sunset Junction now. I think it should be free for Silverlake residents (because it totally is inconvenient for us)…and I think that it should be set up as a donation (like it used to be) rather than a flat admission basis (which sucks).The lineup coulda been a lot better, that said, it’s not exactly bad or anything (it’s just the closing acts both nights are nothing more than a whole bunch of suck.
I only have a few photos of Autolux and Blonde Redhead. I was almost in the photo pit for Autolux but the security jerks pushed me out for BR and it’s just as well as my batteries died and I was getting tired of hanging out with the kiddies. You can see a few more photos of them on the Silverlake Flickr group which I recently joined.
Blonde Redhead have both fraternal relations and marital relations (Simone and Amedeo Pace are identical twins and Kazu and Amedeo are married), so one big happy international family.
I used to think of them as a second-rate Sonic Youth ripoff band for years, but with their last two releases began a transition and with the new one (“23“), they have fully remade themselves into something new…but not entirely. They are an amalgamation of all they were but now with this overt pop/shoegaze density on top. The old fans tend to dislike it, but I think it’s their most fully realized creation yet. You can watch a video here and hear a song here.
Live, they were even better, playing with more energy than I would have imagined for such languid music. I took some pictures of both bands. Click the photo below for more.
Just got done the Quay Brothers (Stephen and Timothy, identical) double disc. Since I’m so familiar with their work as well as their literary, musical and artistic influences, I wasn’t expecting any new revelations yet I was wrong. On the extras disc, I was turned on to the composer Olga Neuwirth (who I feel in retrospect I should frickin have known about by now) as well as the British theatrical duo Ralf Ralf (Barnaby and Jonathan Stone, half-brothers) who are simply amazing.
Next up are the works of the video artist Bill Viola. When he was making his videos in a world of filmmakers, he was seen as marginal. Now most the world shoots in DV, talk about being “ahead of the curve” (by decades). They are quite beautiful and contemplative (at times). I don’t know what it is about slowness (whether practiced by him or Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Tsai Ming-Liang, Angelopolous, Antonioni, etc…that often brings up notions of “the spiritual”. I know Viola uses a lot of “nature” in his imagery so maybe that can’t help but bring it to mind.
Peter Greenaway has some thoughts on Bill Viola and you can watch a camcorder recording of an installation he did for this year’s Venice Biennale here (but read the description first).
This got me thinking about other video artists like the cute, quirky Pipilotti Rist who you can watch right here.
And less “cute” artists like Tony Oursler. (See what I mean here! Seriously, check it.) Whatever happened to him?
“The Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not removed.” Erich Honecker [president of the DDR, Berlin, January 19, 1989]
I know I talked about this back in January, but as more of the DEFA films (besides “The Murderers Are Among Us”) are being released on DVD here, I am belatedly getting to see a nice cross-section of East German cinema. I have about 12 to 15 of them and am trying to see two a week. (Call it a summer project).
One I found quite satisfying was a low-key, modest film called “The Architects” (1989).
The constant thing you keep thinking of was “How this script was even approved?”. It was the last DDR DEFA film production…the wall went down while it was being made and it ultimately ends up describing a society that didnt exist anymore upon it’s premiere.
It didn’t do well, because it was functionally obsolete from the start.
The filmmakers were tempted to stop making it mid-stream, but since they didn’t, it becomes a fascinating look at the tensions and frustrations running among the young there in 1989.
History doesnt occur in a vacuum. And the “spontaneous actions” bringing the wall down were in the air months (of not years) beforehand. That’s what makes this movie such a window into a time and place that the filmmakers themselves perhaps couldn’t have even realized.
They planned (as early as 1987) to made this film to spark, if not a revolution… then at least, a debate…but history sped ahead of their abilities to make the film…and ended up beating them to the finish line.
Wrapping up the holiday…didnt do much. 1 BBQ, a late night out with some old friends (hitting two new bars I had never been to before) and a terrific time chilling out with one very sweet girl.
I’ve been lazy on posts and pictures but it’s hard to be motivated in this heat…
Click the pic to see today’s video:
Red Lorry Yellow Lorry “Spinning Round”
Forgotten nowadays perhaps, but my memory of seeing them live has never left me. And their minimalist rock approach resulted in what is still to this day, perhaps one of the Top 5 best live shows I have ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot of shows).
Most (so-called) “goth bands” wildly suck live. Watch this video and quickly realize why they didn’t fit that cliched, lethargic mold so well.
This reminds me…let me post two of the greatest live rock bands I have ever seen. If you haven’t seen The Ex live, you ain’t seen shit.
The Ex-live at the Knitting Factory in 1999
And then another amazing live band (long gone) was The Jesus Lizard, (if you aren’t used to the singer’s style it could be “off-putting”, as it was to this audience). David Yow is the only person who has managed to kick me in the face without me getting pissed off about it. I wont include a live clip here…but rather a rarely-seen, more restrained appearance on French television in which the singer somehow manages to keep his pants on.
“A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours”. Ray Fitzgerald
“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste they hurry past it.”
Soren Kierkegaard
Listening to the new Angels Of Light record and thinking about how all these heavy noise bands from mid 80′s NYC have mellowed-out and dovetailed with the
“New Weird America” (I hate that term)/ Arthur Magazine scene. Michael Gira is a case in point. His backup band for the Angels Of Light is Akron/Family
Angels Of Light Black River Song (We Are Him)
Thurston Moore/Christina Carter Honest James (Trees Outside The Academy)
In the strange bed partners department:
Click the screen below to see Begotten film director E. Elias Merhige do hack work for Interpol with the videoclip “The Heimlich Maneuver”
It’s gonna be a busy weekend. I’ll spare you the details, but I have these free tix to see the new Michael Moore flick Sicko.
Two things drive me crazy about this filmmaker (and unlike most the bonehead rightists out there, it isn’t necessarily about politics). Is shitty health care in America something that rightwingers are gonna go to bat for?
My problems with him start specifically with his “sentimental” tone. It drives me nuts everytime I see it in action. And also his over-simplification irks me too (or would that be his “selective focus”). Oh…did I mention his annoying, self-serving nature as well.
I once saw him on a talk show when he was asked how he knew there were no WMD in Iraq and he replied simply that “he just guessed there weren’t”. What the hell is he talking about? There was plenty of evidence that Hussain didnt have what was being attributed to him. I read article after article that stated the case was bogus…yet Moore just brings it all back to himself. And that he “guessed”. That’s a ridiculous stance for someone who a certain segment of the population actually relies upon for real information.
However, I think that even Moore’s detractors should admit (if begrudgingly) that his films are fun to watch. And the better ones get you to think too. That said, I’m not ranting against him per se, as he does provide a sort of service to mainstream, pop culture as “a voice” putting out some other points of view to counter the steady stream of disinformation that is churned out daily on AM talk radio “group think”.
Perhaps that is why conservative talk radio is so effective…(to make an almost Michael Moore-ian over-simplification here). People on the right tend to believe their authority figures (“If Rush said it, I believe it”, “I support the president”) and are equally prone towards distrusting the usual handful of shopworn cliches ["big government", "the liberal media", the "foreign-born invader" (be it terrorists, bird flu, illegals, Chinese toothpaste and petfood, the Iranian president, etc..], whereas, at least in the classical sense of the word, “liberals” [meaning roughly in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine and NOT in the current centrist- conservative mold of "so-called" liberals like Bill Clinton or the American democratic party]…that is authentic traditional liberals have always been SCEPTICAL of authority and the status quo.
I would hope at least that the base of the Democratic party would still be sceptical of authoritative voices…and it is in this sense that I dont think “Liberal Talk Radio” will ever work. It has nothing to do with the message but rather the receivers.
Could one ever imagine a true paleo-liberal actually tuning into a show to hear what some idiots “take” on an issue was? (Such as the way that people will tune into to “The Factor” or Hannity? to get the talking points to argue around the water cooler). Conservatives rarely take their beloved leaders to task. If they did, we wouldnt be in this fucking failed war in Iraq. Instead they feel the need to perpetuate a disaster by putting little ribbons on their SUV’s and close their eyes to what is obvious to even the mentally impaired.
You know when you have Thomas Friedman (in the Times) getting scared and wanting to cut our losses and Richard Lugar saying pull out, even the most deeply indoctrinated (barring the delusional) are finally starting to wake up and smell the coffee. But who among the sad, sad choices in their primary are saying…”We fucked up?” Maybe Ron Paul. The only candidate that (at least on that issue) isnt pandering to it’s blind base. I’ve heard it said that the “surge” IS working, that is, as a recruiting drive for the enemy, not for the hapless US soldier placed in an unnecessary warzone, in the middle of a civil war…that we brought to life.. unstablizing a whole region of the world…and draining our military readiness, just so some dumb asshole from Crawford TX could get on an aircraft carrier three years ago and say “Mission Accomplished”. What a fucking joke.
PRESIDENT MINA
MINA in ’08
Literally, if my cat Mina were president instead of Bush…the Katrina disaster would have still happened…true, but the Iraq War wouldn’t have. I think we as a nation would be better off if Mina were president instead of G.W. Bush. What good was a damn tax cut when we are spending so much MORE in Iraq, training Iraqis to use their training to attack us (or each other). A total fiasco.
