Topics | Dangerous Minds (2024)

06.13.2016

09:50 am

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‘The Lost Narrative’ (2015).

I write down what I remember of my dreams each day—trying to capture them before they disappear like dew on a summer morning. Though it’s a good aide—memoire words don’t always capture the fleeting sensation such visions inspire as perfectly as an artist can with a painting.

Mike Worrall is an almost entirely self-taught artist who has been painting large, beautiful, surreal and mysterious pictures inspired by dreams and the subconscious since the early 1960s. As a child he was greatly intrigued by paintings that contained a dream-like narrative of “some sought of mystery element.” His own work followed in a similar direction where he keeps the viewer “guessing and wondering what it’s about”.

Worrall may sometimes be unsure as to what exactly his paintings are about. He might not quite fully understand them but says he is “a firm believer that I should not have to attempt to explain the enigma to people and that the picture should retain some mystery for a lasting interest.”

I’m interested in Dreams and Subconscious thoughts and the weirdness of how we go from one thought to another in an almost drifting process. Dreams are a great source of material for me. Not that I wake up and paint the dream that I may have had, even if I could remember it, I’d then have to most likely make up the details. My paintings are more deliberate and constructed with the element of change.

Worrall has also worked as an “Ideas Artist” in films. One of his paintings inspired Roman Polanski to make a film of William Shakespeare’s play MacBeth. More recently, he designed concept art for the Xenomorph in Alien3.

Born in Derbyshire, England in 1942, Worrall moved to Australia in 1988, where he currently resides. His paintings have been exhibited across the world. Many of his paintings are in collections owned by Polanski, Nicholas Roeg and musician Alan Price.

A whole gallery of Mike Worrall’s work can be seen here.


‘Escape from the Garden of Different Meanings’ (2015).


‘Disparnumerophobia meaning the fear of odd numbers’ (2015).

More after the jump…

06.13.2016

09:25 am

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Ryan Richardson is one of the United States’ foremost collectors, archivists, and dealers of punk rock records and ephemera, as well as being the Internet saint who created free online archives of Star, Rock Scene, and Slash magazines. He also runs Fanzinefaves.com, a repository of various early punk zines as well as the exhaustive punk info blog Break My Face.

We’ve written about Richardson’s punk altruism before here at Dangerous Minds. The last time was when he uploaded the entire print run of the seminal transgressive LA artpunk publication, NO MAG, over at his site CirculationZero.com.

Richardson has done his Good Samaritan work once again, this time with the upload of the complete print run of the Bay Area’s Damage magazine which was published between July 1979 and June 1981. Damage concentrated its coverage on the San Francisco and LA punk scenes, but also covered underground music scenes worldwide. Richardson calls it “a definite contender in a state crowded with fanzine heavyweights.”

Thirteen issues were published including a freebie special edition released between the 9th and 10th issue for the Western Front festival which Damage co-sponsored.

The newsprint zine featured bold graphics, photography, and loads of writing and interviews of great historical importance to anyone following the early California punk scene. Your mileage may vary, but the San Francisco scene between 1978-1983 is perhaps my personal favorite all-time music scene, so these issues are absolute gold to me. For my money, nothing beats the aesthetic of arty punk fanzines prior to the age of desktop publishing, and Damage is as fine an example of the form as any you care to name.

Publisher Brad Lapin spoke of Damage’s importance as a historical record in a 2010 statement to the San Francisco Zine Fest:

While I trust that the magazine speaks for itself, both for good and ill, I suppose I could say by way of explanation that, beyond all the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, that is, beyond the pure visceral FUN of punk and life in the underground, there were also deeply serious issues of politics, of social justice and, above all, of aesthetics that connected and inspired the many people involved in the Damage project. Because these concerns were particularly articulated in the scene as it existed in San Francisco three decades ago, Damage’s importance today, like that of the other zines, is as a kind of constant witness to an unique time, place and circ*mstance; one that spoke and one hopes still speaks to the immanent primacy of youthful idealism and to the notion that there is a deep and abiding value in a radical, even desperate rejection of the commonplace, the accepted, the normal. Conformity and regimentation then, as now, are the foresworn enemies of the creative energy that is the essence and the wellspring of youth. That stance of absolute defiance to which the punk aesthetic aspires and which, in fact, is it’s raison d’etre is no less a viable ideal today than it was 30 years ago. If anything, it is more necessary and more important.

The download of the complete set is free, but Richardson asks that those taking advantage make a charitable donation to Electronic Frontier Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, or Austin Pets Alive. Donations to these charities make the project worthwhile for Richardson, so it would be, you know, the cool thing to do to toss a few bucks that way, considering the amazing gift being provided here. Richardson has placed donation links on CirculationZero.com—go there now to download Damage, and while you’re waiting on that file transfer, scroll through this gallery of covers and pages from Damage‘s history:



More after the jump…

06.10.2016

04:32 pm

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From the Dangerous Minds archives:

In May/June of 1981, The Clash were booked to play at the curiously named “Bond International Casino”—a discotheque that was previously a swanky supper club in the 1940s, and then a low-rent clothing store called Bonds until 1977 and they just kept the sign—in New York City in support of the sprawling three record set Sandinista! album. They were meant to play just eight gigs in the smallish Times Square space—capacity 1800 people—but the performances were dangerously oversold by greedy promoters. Fire marshals and the NYC Building Department closed down both of the May 30th concerts, but the band vowed to honor each and every last ticket and so the number of shows was extended to seventeen, with matinee and evening performances added.



The Clash’s Bond Casino shows became an integral part of the rebel band’s legend and featured hand-picked opening acts like The Fall, 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 Sugarhill Gang, their pal from Texas Joe Ely and others. Many of the groups were openly booed by the rowdy crowds.

One of the shows, on June 9th, was professionally recorded for an FM radio broadcast and widely bootlegged. You can easily find it and every other of the Clash’s Bond shows—all of them were bootlegged—on audio blogs. But not a lot of footage has been seen from the Clash’s Bond residency. There were some tantalizing clips that were seen in Don Letts’ excellent Grammy-winning Westway to the World rock doc (released in 2000), as well as in the abandoned short “The Clash on Broadway” (on Westway DVD as an extra), but sadly the docs didn’t give you an entire song. However, Letts’ Bond footage was apparently shot on the same day as the FM recording was made and an enterprising Clash fan has restriped the stereo audio from that source and synced up some other angles found in various other places (mostly Letts’ docs). The results are probably the best glimpse we have at what went on at these shows.

More after the jump…

06.10.2016

01:26 pm

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On Easter Sunday in 1996 there was a big festival in Düsseldorf, Germany—the German TV show Rockpalast was there and captured some outstanding footage of Sonic Youth in its prime, supporting their ninth album Washing Machine, from which most of the material played in the show stems.

Other acts participating in what came to be called “Osterrocknacht” (Easter Rock Night) were Cypress Hill, the Walkabouts, Smashing Pumpkins, the Afghan Whigs, Garbage, and Chumbawamba (a year before their breakout hit “Tubthumping”).

Sonic Youth doesn’t play a single song from before Daydream Nation. In fact, 9 out of the 11 songs come off of SY’s two most recent albums, Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star and Washing Machine.

The first three songs amount to throat-clearing before the band starts really kicking ass on “Washing Machine.” The camerawork, audio, and editing are all excellent, and the 21-minute finale of “The Diamond Sea” has to be seen to be believed.

Setlist:
Teen Age Riot
Bull in the Heather
Starfield Road
Washing Machine
Junkie’s Promise
Saucer-Like
Becuz
Sugar Kane
Skip Tracer
Skink
The Diamond Sea

via Fluxtumblr

06.10.2016

10:20 am

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It was 1974 when Gary Trudeau debuted the newest member of his Doonesbury comic crew, “Uncle Duke,” to the world. And the man whom the character was based on, gun-toting Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was not pleased. In an interview with High Times, Thompson recalled the moment he became aware of Uncle Duke.

It was a hot, nearly blazing day in Washington, and I was coming down the steps of the Supreme Court looking for somebody, Carl Wagner or somebody like that. I’d been inside the press section, and then all of a sudden I saw a crowd of people and I heard them saying, “Uncle Duke,” I heard the words Duke, Uncle; it didn’t seem to make any sense. I looked around, and I recognized people who were total strangers pointing at me and laughing. I had no idea what the f*ck they were talking about. I had gotten out of the habit of reading funnies when I started reading the Times. I had no idea what this outburst meant…It was a weird experience, and as it happened I was sort of by myself up there on the stairs, and I thought: “What in the f*ck madness is going on? Why am I being mocked by a gang of strangers and friends on the steps of the Supreme Court? Then I must have asked someone, and they told me that Uncle Duke had appeared in the Post that morning.

Thompson went on to say that “no one grows up wanting to be a cartoon character” and that if he ever caught up with Garry Trudeau, he would “rip his lungs out.” While that never happened, in 1992 Trudeau published book called Action Figure!; The Life and Times of Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke that chronicled the misadventures of Uncle Duke that came with a five-inch action figure of dear Uncle Duke along with a martini glass, an Uzi, cigarette holder, a bottle of booze, and a chainsaw. While Trudeau has never been one to shy away from controversy, this bold move seemed rather suicidal or at the very least a very direct threat to the current location of Trudeau’s lungs. You can actually still find the book and its sneering Uncle Duke action figure on auction sites like eBay and on Amazon like I did.



More images follow, after the jump…

06.10.2016

09:49 am

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In 1968 the artist Brion Gysin invited Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones to record a group of traditional Jbala Sufi trance musicians—better known as the Master Musicians—perform at the village of Jajouka in northern Morocco.

Gysin had long been familiar with the Master Musicians having been introduced to them and “Joujouka” music by writer Paul Bowles in 1950. Gysin thought the music of “the people of Pan” would be of some interest to Jones. Jones agreed. He traveled with Gysin to Jajouka, accompanied by his then girlfriend Suki Potier, recording engineer George Chkiantz, and painter/folklorist Mohamed Hamri.

Morocco was a favorite holiday destination for the Rolling Stones as it offered easy access to marijuana. Keith Richards later described the experience as a fantasy where they were “transported” and…

You could be Sinbad the Sailor, One Thousand and One Nights.

Jones used a Uher recorder to capture the songs performed by the Master Musicians. These recordings included songs for Jajouka’s “most important religious holiday festival, Aid el Kbir” when a young boy is dressed as Bou Jeloud the Goat God in the “skin of a freshly slaughtered goat.” The boy then runs around the village as the music becomes increasingly frenzied. Gysin claimed this was a ritual to protect the villagers’ health. He said the festival harked back to an ancient pre-Roman festival Lupercalia, held in mid-February as a cleansing and fertility ritual to ward off evil spirits.



As Gysin later told Stanley Booth (and a very drunk William Burroughs) in a rambling tale in 1970—as recounted Booth’s book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones—Jones and his companions were guests at traditional meal in the village, when Jones had an epiphanic vision—or more likely he tripped out—and believed himself to be a goat.

‘I would really like to talk about Joujouka and what that music is and what Brian got on tape and how it ever happened that he got there. How does he [Jones] appear in your book?’

‘Brian? As—well—sort of—as a little goat god, I suppose.’

‘I have a funny tale which I’ll tell you about just that. A very funny thing happened up there. The setting was extremely theatrical in that we were sitting under a porch of a house made of wattles and mud. Very comfortable place, cushions were laid around like a little theatre, like the box of an old-fashioned theatre, and a performance was going on in the courtyard. And at one moment—dinner obviously had to be somewhere in the offing, like about an hour away, everybody was beginning to think about food—and we had these acetylene lamps, giving a great very theatrical glow to the whole scene, rather like limelight used to be, a greenish sort of tone.’

[Okay Brion we get the picture it was very very very very very very theatrical…now get on with the story….]

‘And the most beautiful goat that anybody had ever seen—pure white!—was suddenly led right across the scene, between Brian and Suki and Hamri and me [...] so quickly that for a moment hardly anybody realized at all what was happening, until Brian leapt to his feet, and he said, “That’s me!” and was pulled down and sort of subsided, and the music went on, and it went on for a few minutes like that, and moments lengthened into an hour, or two hours, which can sometimes be three hours or four hours or five hours—-’

‘Long as it takes to kill a goat,’ Burroughs said.

‘—and we were absolutely ravenous, when Brian realized he was eating the same white goat.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘He said, “It’s like Communion.”’

‘“This is my body,’” I [Booth] said. ‘But Jesus didn’t eat himself, he fed the others.’

‘If he’d been sensible, he’d have eaten Judas,’ Burroughs said. ‘I’m gonna eat Graham Greene next time I see him. Gulp!’

Continues after the jump…

06.10.2016

09:00 am

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Robert Evans, the wunderkind Hollywood studio executive best known for his work on Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, The Godfather and Chinatown had gotten himself into a bit of a jam back in 1980.

He was busted after agreeing to purchase $19,000 worth of cocaine—an amount he claimed was for himself as a user, denying the federal selling and distribution charges that were brought against him. Evans was convicted, and in a punishment befitting a big shot Hollywood producer, he didn’t get jail—he was ordered to create a public service anti-drug campaign. The end result of this slap on the wrist was one of the biggest TV mega-turds of all time: Get High On Yourself which aired on NBC in the Fall of 1981.

Evans put up $400,000 of his own money and recruited That’s Incredible‘s Cathy Lee Crosby to co-produce an hour-long “very special program.” Evans put his rolodex to work and pulled in over 50 celebrities including Bob Hope, Carol Burnett, Muhammad Ali, Paul Newman, Scott Baio, Robby Benson, Kristy McNichol, Herve Villechaize, Dana Plato, Mark Hamill, and Bruce Jenner. Evans hired the jingle-writer responsible for “I Love New York” to compose the cornball earworm theme song. The special consists of the celebrities getting together to sing the song—a format which would be used to much greater success a few years later with Band Aid’s “Don’t They Know It’s Christmas” and USA For Africa’s “We Are the World.”



NBC turned this preachy anti-drug celebrity clusterf*ck into a week-long celebration titled Get High On Yourself Week. At least 28 different commercials and promos were shot for the NBC roll out which was promoted for weeks in advance. NBC aired one Get High On Yourself spot every hour during prime time for eight days.



In his autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture Robert Evans cites Get High On Yourself as the high mark of his career.

More after the jump…

06.09.2016

09:03 pm

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In 1970, Alejandro Jodorowsky brought his adaptation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the stage in Mexico City. A creation for its time and place, Jodorowsky’s Zarathustra was a play for four men (A, B, C, and Zarathustra) and two women (D and E), all (eventually) nude on a bare, white stage. The script indicated that the actors were to stand at the entrance of the theater and talk with the audience before the action began; Jodorowsky’s Zen master, the monk Ejo Takata, sat on stage meditating for the two-hour duration of the performance.

As the director recounts in The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the staging of the production—called Zaratustra in Spanish—reflected his ongoing Zen practice:

My ambitions were becoming centered on the theater. Nevertheless, Ejo Takata’s teachings—to be instead of to seem, to live simply, to practice the teaching instead of merely reciting it, and knowing that the words we use to describe the world are not the world—had profoundly changed my vision of what theater should be. In my upcoming production, a theatrical version of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, I had stripped the stage of its usual décor, including even curtains and ropes, and had the walls painted white. Defying censorship, the actors and actresses undressed completely on stage after reciting lines from the Gospel of Thomas: “The disciples asked him: ‘When will you be revealed, and when will we be able to see you?’ And Jesus said: ‘When you shed your clothing without shame, and when you take your jewels and cast them under your feet and trample them like little children, then will you be able to contemplate the Son of the Living One and have no more fear.’”

The production was a success, with full houses from Tuesday through Sunday. I then proposed to Ejo (without much hope) that he meditate before the public during the performance. To my astonishment, the master accepted. He arrived punctually, took his seat on the side of the stage, and meditated without moving for two hours. The contrast between the actors speaking their lines and the silent monk dressed in his ritual robes had a staggering effect. Zarathustra continued to run for a full year and a half.

Standing: Henry West, Brontis Jodorowsky, Héctor Bonilla, Micky Salas, Carlos Ancira, Isela Vega, Jorge Luke and Alvaro Carcaño. Sitting: Luis Urías, Valerie Jodorowsky (pregnant with Teo), Carlos (nicknamed “the hairy guy”), Alejandro Jodorowsky, Cristobal Jodorowsky and Susana Kamini.

So far as I know, you can’t watch a performance of Zarathustra on the web, but below, you can listen to the soundtrack LP recorded by the cast and the band Las Damas Chinas (Chinese Checkers), and if you open this link in another window, you can follow along in the script. Digital copies of the soundtrack are available from Paniques Records. It is, of course, entirely in Spanish, but that shouldn’t discourage anyone. These words from D’s song ring out in a universal tongue:

¡Mis piernas, mis dedos, mis pelos,
AAAmoor. . .!
Mi saliva, mi excremento, mi corazón. . .

(Translation: “My legs, my fingers, my hairs / Looove. . .! / My saliva, my sh*t, my heart . . .”)

While we’re on the subject of Alejandro Jodorowsky, don’t forget to give your money to the Indiegogo campaign for his upcoming feature Poesía Sin Fin (Endless Poetry). If you choose the “poetic money” perk, he’ll pay you back in bills of his own magical currency. Jodorowsky’s life and work are always cause for celebration.

06.09.2016

05:04 pm

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We already knew that Nick Rhodes, one of the founding members of Duran Duran, is a sensitive and creative individual. Few events are as aesthetically hyper-charged as his 1984 wedding to Iowa heiress Julie Anne Friedman.

So perhaps it was inevitable, given how many teenybopper magazines the members of Duran Duran appeared in between 1981 and 1987, that someone would have the bright idea to stick Rhodes in a museum and get some quick reactions to the various pieces of art. Which a magazine called Star Hits did in late 1985—between Seven and the Ragged Tiger and Notorious; this would have been a prime Arcadia phase.

When I first saw the pics of Rhodes holding or positioned near various artifacts from the 1980s art scene, I was momentarily sure that they must represent Rhodes discussing artworks he had bought. Alas, no. They put him in a museum and got a few quotes, that’s all.

The feature was called “Making an Exhibition of Himself” and appeared (I am pretty sure this is what happened) in the November 1985 issue of Star Hits and then was repurposed in the January 1-14 1986 issue of Smash Hits, which was a look back at 1985. Rhodes explains that when he was growing up in Birmingham he would visit the Ikon Gallery and look at the art. There’s no mention of where these photographs were taken or what the show was called, except to say that it was “a recent exhibition of young American artists.”



Let’s examine the four artists who unexpectedly found themselves featured in a music magazine aimed at teenagers.

Mike co*ckrill and Judge Hughes were pop art collaborators from 1982 to 1987; here is a a broader spectrum of their output. Nancy Dwyer is a scultpor who often does larger pieces with a typographical element, as in her 1990 poly-coated nylon work “Big Ego.” Lady Pink is often called “the first lady of graffiti” for her unusual position as a woman in the graffiti world with a large body of work; she had the lead role in the 1983 film Wild Style and collaborated with Jenny Holzer on a poster series.

The strangest artist of the bunch is Mike Bidlo, whose career has flirted with outright plagiarism more than once. Bidlo once executed a series of paintings using the same media that Jackson Pollock used and called it “Not Pollock.” He reproduced a large number of Picasso paintings and called the show Picasso’s Women, 1901-71. He saved his most ambitious idea for the master of appropriation, Andy Warhol himself. In 1984 he re-created Warhol’s Factory on the top floor of PS 1 and enlisted friends to imitate various of Warhol’s hangers-on, with Bidlo himself occupying the role of the white-haired master. If you click on his artnet profile you see, among other items, a painting of a Brillo box and a silk-screen-style painting of Jackie O alongside several treatments of a Duchamp-ian urinal.

More after the jump…

06.09.2016

03:28 pm

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Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” is one of the most powerfully evocative and epically heart-breaking “love lost” songs ever written. It is preposterous, although it is not kitsch. It is sublime. It’s a masterpiece for the ages.

But it drives some people nuts.

“MacArthur Park” was once ridiculed by “humorist” Dave Barry as the “worst song in modern history” and as having the “worst lyrics.” (Then again if Dave Barry is yer barometer o’ musical taste…) Others, more generously, have called the lyrics to “MacArthur Park” among the most misunderstood in pop music history, but until fairly recently, the great songwriter himself was always somewhat coy about the meaning. And why shouldn’t he have been? What might seem to be obtuse imagery was anything but—and he obviously knew this—but why ruin what people projected onto his words when they heard the song by explaining exactly what it meant to him? Many people probably have their own deeply held versions of what that song is “really” about. To them. It’s one of the key elements that makes “MacArthur Park” so personal for so many people.

After years of listening to and enduring what I’m sure must have been annoying efforts to either perform an exegesis on “MacArthur Park,” or simply lampoon it, Jimmy Webb spilled the beans about one of his greatest songs to the Guardian in 2013:

The lyrics to “MacArthur Park” infuriate some people. “Someone left the cake out in the rain/ I don’t think that I can take it/ ‘Cause it took so long to bake it/ And I’ll never have that recipe again.” They think it’s a psychedelic trip. But everything in the song is real. There is a MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, near where my girlfriend worked selling life insurance. We’d meet there for lunch, and there would be old men playing checkers by the trees, like in the lyrics.

I’ve been asked a million times: “What is the cake left out in the rain?” It’s something I saw… But as a metaphor for a losing a chapter of your life, it seemed too good to be true. When she broke up with me, I poured the hurt into the song.

In an interview with Newsday the following year, Webb further explained:

Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park. ... Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.

It was not the only deeply longing love song that he’d write for this same woman. Immoralized as the girl with “the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knees,” Suzy Horton was also the muse for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Where’s the Playground, Susie” and “Didn’t We.” They’d met when they both attended the same high school in Colton, CA and Webb had carried a torch for her for years. She was apparently somewhat less than sold on him, however. When Webb found out that Horton was getting married, he composed “The Worst That Could Happen” (a hit for the Brooklyn Bridge) with the heart-ripping refrain:

“Girl, I heard you’re getting married, heard you’re getting married…. maybe it’s the best thing for you, but it’s the worst that could happen — to me.”

“MacArthur Park” and its epic musical detailing of the end of their relationship was offered to chart-topping vocal group the Association as a cantata—their producer Bones Howe had asked him to write something elaborate and orchestral for the band, and this was what Webb had come up with—but the composition was rejected for being too long.

Around this same time, Webb got chummy with Irish actor Richard Harris, who he got drunk with backstage at a charity event in Los Angeles. Harris sent the composer a telegram asking him to come to London to record an album, and Webb joined him. “MacArthur Park” was the final song in the pile and when he played it for Harris, the actor told him he’d give him his car—a Rolls-Royce Phantom Five—if the song became a hit (it was and he never did).

A sh*tton of “MacArthur Park” after the jump…