Just a quick plug for the upcoming three-day Splore music and art festival to be held near Auckland from the 14-16 February. Lots of amazing things going on, should be a fantastic blast of way too much cultural entertainment at one time and place. You can consult the line-up and further info at: http://www.splore.net/. For now, Happy Waitangi Day everyone near and far!
To me, this 1968 clip from The Monkees television show encapsulates “the Sixties” in a few minutes better than almost any other. Here you have a skit featuring Monkee Mike Nesmith clowning it up with the formidable musician Frank Zappa. Or maybe I should also say the formidable Mike Nesmith, as he contributed much to developing both the country rock of the 1970s and the music video in the 1980s—of course these could be read as dubious accomplishments! But remember this clip was shot for mainstream US TV during a really insane period of popular culture (even leaving aside broader cultural factors and a little thing called the Vietnam War). Now why would musician Frank Zappa widely acknowledged as a very avant-garde figure of rock and roll be playing along with the Monkees, often derided as the pre-fab four? Well, lots of proper musicians of the time thought the Monkees were cool; and definitely Nesmith and fellow member Peter Tork were proper musicians also, and Davy Jones was a Broadway-skilled entertainer, and Mickey Dolenz could manage a charismatic and infectious lead vocal, as in I’m a Believer, (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone, Last Train to Clarksville, and Pleasant Valley Sunday. All of these were among the more memorable Karaoke-bound tunes of that era, and beloved also by the punk bands who consistently covered and praised the Monkees also. But back to the clip, Nesmith and Zappa poke fun at each other (“You’re a popular musician I’m dirty, gross, and ugly!”) but more importantly at a culture that valorizes simplicity and easy-to-read pop imagery, amidst a period of increasing, even nightmarish, complexity. Zappa, a composer and aficionado of modern music, then “plays a car,” thus turning the eroticized sixties automobile culture towards dysfunction, chaos, and Dada-like pranksterism. Have a look!
Works by Massey University's MDes students, and the final graduates from the one-year MFA programme will soon be on view in the last February exhibition. The College of Creative Arts will be exhibiting more graduate work from the MDes and the new two-year MFA programme in November. Exhibition Details: Open to the public daily, February 7-15, 12noon-5pm, Massey University Wellington, Entrance C off Wallace Street. The exhibition is located within adjacent buildings on the campus : Te Ara Hihiko, The Engine Room gallery and Block 1. Congratulations to all the artists and designers involved!
A brief attempt to forget about any terrible stuff in the world and trance out to the amazing Kawabata Makoto's Acid Mother's Temple. There's precious little that beats great Japanese psychedelic music. Brief interview followed by performance clip from 2013 Psych Fest, Austin, TX. Rear projections, improvisation, hair and even more hair!
Supposedly everyone is "binge watching" the so-called new golden age of television thanks to DVDs and internet streaming, and that's probably true. Lately, I have also been "binge-reading" to catch up on some of the more interesting blogs and online publications, including many linked on this site. Although like countless folks I gnawed my way through the entirety of Breaking Bad, I kept feeling that it was a much less satisfying feast in the last season or two. I've read many articles and reviews of the acclaimed series, but just finally caught up with this brilliant piece by the Wellington writer and editor Tim Wong entitled Breaking Bad's bad habits. Posted on the terrific site The Lumière Reader back in October, I thought now dust had settled a bit on Breaking Bad-mania, I would re-post this as (a) it is the best critical writing I've yet read on the show, and (b) it also analyzes some other programs, such as the comparatively underrated Treme and Rectify.
The writer William S. Burroughs was a polarizing figure. With his aristocratic-bohemian-reptilian disdain for the status quo and all things wholesome, he was both genuinely admirable in a certain sense but also seemed dizzyingly strange and scary. Maybe it was his (accidental) assassination of his wife Joan? His connections with arguably even stranger folks like L. Ron Hubbard and Wilhelm Reich? His lifelong drug addiction? Definitely not the best poster persona for the kind, gentle, sustainable lives we are all meant to be living these days. Nonetheless, to my mind, he was without doubt one of the most innovative writers of the Twentieth Century. His reputation may have faded but there always seems to be one more teenager huddled somewhere with a copy of Junky or Naked Lunch, or an art student entranced by (Brion Gysin and) Burroughs' Dada-inspired cut-up method. Barry Miles, longtime counterculture chronicler, has written a new biography of Burroughs and 2014 marks his hundredth birthday. Peter Schjeldahl has written a lengthy, ambivalent appraisal in The New Yorker and Jeremy Lybarger weighs in with considerably more enthusiasm in Bookforum. Both pieces well worth a read.
I certainly wasn’t intending to give the impression that I’m writing an “obituaries blog” but some very important artistic figures have died recently, and in the cases of Ricard and Hoffman, although I never met either personally, both took up a huge amount of space in my cultural imagination. Of the two, Hoffman would need little introduction for anyone remotely familiar with the last couple of decades of Hollywood cinema, and he is already being proclaimed as “greatest actor of his generation.” Such superlatives are meaningless, especially now, but I would agree with that assessment. I spent many hours wading through almost every movie he made over the years, even if awful, just considering that his mere involvement would likely make it worth my time. Ricard was far less known in the wider circles of popular culture but an integral figure in the New York art world as a critic and poet, and in more recent years as a painter who inscribed poetic phrases onto his canvases. His 1981 essay “The Radiant Child” is one of the most memorable pieces on artists Keith Haring and Jean Michel-Basquiat. I had the fortunate opportunity to write on Ricard for a catalogue of a 2005 exhibition entitled Sad Songs curated by artist Bill Conger and wrote: “These recent paintings are inscribed with breathless anecdotes, as if Haikus hastily scrawled in lipstick onto a bathroom mirror. While artists today are frequently at odds with painting, Ricard offers paintings at odds with themselves, as if deciding whether to be texts, images, or from a distance appealingly bright, monochromatic ciphers. … The poet has always been brutally confessional in his writings, but this approach is often leavened with an unlikely degree of tenderness. Ricard is often abrasive yet the confirmed aesthete.” Given the wild circles that Ricard travelled with over the years—Warhol’s Factory and the East Village Scene—his death of cancer at the age of 67 effectively means he outlived so many of his contemporaries, while Hoffman, purportedly dead of a drug overdose, at the age of 46 has died prematurely, terribly, and avoidably. Read Ricard’s writings, watch Hoffman’s filmography. Both are revelatory.
People tend to love the Pixies so much that I almost want to move in the opposite direction, despite their obvious greatness, and especially I’ve always been much fonder of their former bassist Kim Deal’s band The Breeders. I’ve been trawling the Breeders videos and other material around the sea of internet, and as the Pixies have just announced the obvious (Deal’s irreplaceable, what news!) I’m posting some cool vintage and more recent Breeders and Kim and Kelley Deal related stuff including a terrific 2002 Dutch Documentary The Real Deal, a performance of Divine Hammer on Conan O’Brian, the original Cannonball video, and a more recent interview/song clip of Kim and Kelley's cover of the song Wicked Little Town. And 20 years since their seminal indie CD Last Splash was released! For lots more info see: http://thebreederslsxx.com/ and http://www.kelleydeal.net/.
Benjamin Moser, the authorized biographer of writer Susan Sontag (1933-2004), often acknowledged front-runner for intellectual hottie of the previous century, provides an engaging account of his (and others) involvement in scouring her formidable archives on the New Yorker magazine’s blog. And if you have dipped into the recently published journals it becomes evident how Sontag was an inveterate notetaker, often incorporating abbreviated bits that would be challenging for most any researcher. Particularly fascinating beyond the sheer volume of paper material is how archivists are contending with preserving her e-mails. And as Moser recounts: “Susan Sontag wrote seventeen thousand one hundred and ninety-eight e-mails, which will soon be available for consultation on a special laptop. I was given a special viewing at the library, and the experience gave me a queasiness that I have never felt during the years I have conducted historical research.”
I've been reading between my hapless attempts to multitask LIttle Failure, the hilarious new memoir by novelist Gary Shteyngart. It's a bit (put very bluntly) as if Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory were remixed by a Generation Xer—and I hope that description tempts! Haven't gotten far enough and maybe not enough clear headed brain space to manage a "proper" book review, but I was amused by the author's Q and A on the New York Times' site in which he states: "I like stories where people suffer a lot. If there's no suffering, I kind of tune out." You can read the full (brief) "By the Book" gabfest here.
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