'She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.' nationalgeographic.com/afghan-girl/
The club kids, now they looked like a fun bunch didn't they? For those not in the know... well I guess you could (and should) just watch the above video with them on The Joan Rivers show. Essentially they were a gaggle of eccentricly dressed popular promoters, designers and party types from New York (and to a different extent London) who dominated the club scenes from the mid 80's up until the early 90's. They're a spectle and an entertaining one at that, both visually and due of the stories them all.
I might as well get the juicy part out of the way, in 1996 one of the founding clubkid members Michael Alig was convicted of murder of his friend Andre "Angel" Melendez because of a dispute over drugs. There's a lot more to the story, including heroin, self-exile and decomposing bodies in bathtubs, but the wikipedia article is probably more enjoyable than the atrocious looking early noughties film Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin as Alig and bizarrely Seth Green and James St James that portrays Michael's rise and fall.
Despite all this Alig's still got a bit of an endearing appeal, for example in this interview with an imprisoned Alig bemoaing his sober situation the top comment is someone stating how they 'can't wait to go to his first party when he gets out!', this being the party of a convicted murderer and notorious heroin addict, but let's be honest, you know it would be good wouldn't you?
In an another far less jovial interview on the Phil Donahue show the 'clubkids' are forced to justify their outfits, and describe them as a way of living out their fantasies and the whole movement is about espacism essentially. One of the few (if only) surviving clubkids, i.e. not dead, drug riddled or in jail, James St James talks quite soundly about Ketamine in the video below, and claims that it gives him that fulfilling high that apparently all them were always searching for. Quite a strangely sweet sentiment when thought about that way. With the way people live out double lives these days online who knows how these people would have dolled out their personal brands. In fact James does post a lot for the very good blog worldofwonder.net.
Insanely productive and talented during genuinely remarkable career he designed for The Michael Clark company, posed for Lucien Frued, co-owned the nightclub Taboo (which Boy George would later name his musical about the era on), wrote the disgusting semi smash Useless Man and was a celebrated artist and designer, turning his life and body in a living gallery of his works and ideas.
There's a very in depth if not particularly well done documentary called The Legend of Leigh Bowery on Youtube that's worth it's 90 minute run time for all the footage of his life and engaging interviews with close friends and associates. I even got a bit teary towards the end actually.
When you look at sheer outrageous clothes people like Bowery were wearing and look at what people/celebutantes wear in London now it reminds of the interview Vice did with Lawrence a few years ago, where he states, quite rightly, something along the lines of you can't really shock anyone with the clothes you wear now. You feel like you've seen it all before and not even a pack of 7ft raving Cybergoths could make you arch your head. Even though I do maintain that it is good that people can freely wear whatever they want to without getting abused or thrown dirty looks, its feels more like apathy rather than tolerance. And that ability to shock comes from the unexpected and the original, and that's the main attraction of Bowery and the sheer amount of brilliant ideas he had. People are still trying to shock others in how they present themselves and always will, it's just the ease of the internet, that's taken it out of the public sphere, perhaps.
Simlarly though it's this focus on the importance of ideas, and more specifically fresh perspectives that's one of the main arguments of this interesting video I watched recently by Sir Ken Robinson on the need for a new type of school system in the 21st century. Though I must admit that this wide-eyed 2006 lecture carries a somewhat redundant feel in austerity riddled company-sponsered-Academy age of 2011. Then again it was during the last society-purge under Thatchers 80's regime that colourful escapist characters like Bowery emerged, who knows. It's either that or all black Hard Times Chic ala Sade.
Also I couldn't fit it in but in an episode of the Dexters Laboratory spin off Dial M For Monkey Bowery served as inspiration for a fur hungry fashionista villian, though I can't find any footage of that episode I remember it from when I was younger. Sure I do.
I guess we haven't really been exelling at this blog recently, but I think I'm gonna start working on my 'blogosphere presence' again this year, unless until I get bored of it, which I probably will, probably around March/April? But I've written it down and posted it, so that might make a differece. I guess with the Crystal World because posts are so infrequent you never want to post anything unless you're 100% sure about the subject and so it's incredibly easy to talk yourself out of it, especially when you look at a site like Dangerous Minds, which does everything you want to do but better.
I was playing Karaoke at a girl called Purple's house the other day, Love Fool by The Cardigans cropped up and I had forgotten how incredible that song is and they are, here's another gem.
Music videos influenced by Henri-George Clouzot's unfinished masterpiece Inferno (which was documented in the excellent and imaginatively titled 'Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno') are like buses - you wait ages for one, and two come along at the same time.....
(For the record, Scissor Sisters song & video >>>>>>>>>>> British Sea Power song & video)
Funniest man on the planet and firm Crystal World favourite, Nicholas Gurewitch is back, sort of, with some video shorts on Vimeo. ThePBF creator has even made some sci-fi cartoon epic skits for the BBC called Elite Fleet which have his trademark comic timing and imagination. I can't wait for this guy to make a film. It'd be incredible.
Got rickrolled into listening to this track from a tweet by True Panther Sounds claiming it to be a collaboration between James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never. Despite the fitting connection, it turned out to be the 1984 song Loverboy by Britain's biggest selling Black artist of all time, Billy Ocean.
I also wasn't disappointed, as the video is just incredible, watch it now. It's an insane mix of Ocean warbling in front of a green screen blissfully unaware of the fantasy/tical world around him, seemingly made up from the rejected Star Wars sequel costumes and the weirdness of the The Dark Crystal. The song itself leaves a little bit to be desired but has its charms none the less. Love to know what the record label/general public thought.
Speaking of The Dark Crytal, Jim Hensons terrifying masterpiece, the first ever live action film billed as not having any actors in it, is scheduled for a sequel. Due for release in 2011, The Power of the Dark Crystal is based on Henson and co-writer David Odell's ideas for the film formed in the late 80's. The film's been caught up in pre-production hell since 2005 though and fansites (http://powerofthedarkcrystal.blogspot.com/) have had to struggle with whatever information they can grab onto, currently it seems the film's being produced by an Australian company called Omnilab.
Below's an unofficial teaser trailer for the film, featuring some production sketches, though whether it'll ever be released and scar as many childhoods as the original did to mine, remains to be seen.
It was a desire to listen to some of the work of pioneering Disco remixer Tom Moulton (above) at around 1amish that sparked off one of those brilliant internet voyages that occasionally break up my constant bouts of flicking between Facebook and Gmail.
I went onto the unofficial (?) myspace fan page and listened to his mix of King Goes Forth's Don't Take My Shadow which unsurprisingly turned out to be incredible and had everything that I've come to like about his edits: catchy hook, loads of dreamy soul style back up vocals, classic emo disco vibes etc. Browsing around the page I noticed a link to an interview Moulton did with Dj History in 2008. It's a wholly worthwhile read (link) in which he discusses his career path starting as a buyer for a Jukebox company then onto an early champion of stereo and how he became involved in disco, making the first remixes, the emergence of disco/DJs and the usual banter about how New York gay clubs in the 70's were the pretty much best places in the world ever.
It led me onto a couple of things, Moulton spoke about how B.T. Express were livid when they first heard what he had done to their track "Do It Till You're Satisfied', unsurprisingly it blew up and became a hit. They even got to go on Soul Train and brag about how the song length (in itself revolutionary) was their idea. Now even though the internet is an amazing resource and I can access footage of them playing that song on Soul Train within seconds, we're still not quite at the level of Revenge of the Sith style meta-Jedi library just yet, as I couldn't find the footage of that exact exchange with Don Cornelius. But well done anyway.
I went off and listened to the what is claimed to be the first 12" ever commercially available, made by Walter Gibbons, after he was described by Moulton as a person who was 'as white as can be' - judge for yourself
DJHistory also do some other really great interviews with other DJing pioneers, including a fantastic sit down with Jimmy Savile, who you know turns out to be quite important (at least according to him) in the whole business of clubs, disk jockeys and young people congregating and dancing in the UK. One of his claims is that he was the first person to think of having two record players on stage at the same time. Considering he grew up in a world where the very idea of dancing to a record was completely laughable, the fact that he was hugely influentially in changing that (for instance he actually did setup dancehalls and DJ's in other cities, eventually running over 50 and 400, respectively, of them) he can make up what he likes really.
-Special thanks to John Bloomfield for introducing me to Moulton months ago when he played me his mix of So Much For Love by Moment of Truth which completely dicks on the original and was the only thing I wanted to hear for a good few weeks afterwards. I think on that same night I stole a clock from a particular East London pub. The clock is now in broken pieces stuffed in a bag in John's house - 'THANKS' Karma.
Also funnily enough earlier tonight I had a similar urge to listen to some Nas, ended up rippin through the hits on youtube, reading the quite decent article about him on Allmusic and shamefully hearing the acidic Jay-Z diss Ether for the first time.
I did the pretentious thing afterwards and in an attempt to be interesting posted his full name 'Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones' on Twitter, but then thought nargh, deleted it and instead decided to put all the words together and make it a hash tag, clever. I clicked the post afterwards and found out that coincidentally some super fans had used the same tag yesterday, as it it was Nasty Nas' birthday, he was 37.
And another thing, whilst it's probably weird and pretty cool actually that Lil' Wayne sampled Iron Maiden's Fear of the Dark for his song 'Best Rapper Alive'. It's definitely a lot weirder and probably not all that cool that Brandy sampled a relatively obscure Maiden track (The Clansmen) for her song 'I Tried' in which she sings lyrics like 'I’m sittin' home on a cold day...Think I wanna hear some Coldplay'
The video for Peter Gabriel & Laurie Anderson's Excellent Birds that I included in my previous post was one that I discovered a while back when searching through YouTube for footage of Anderson to post on facebook. I had been previously unaware of its existence, but perhaps this is because it was not created with MTV in mind, but rather was part of a satellite broadcast "installation" by video art pioneer Nam June Paik, Good Morning, Mr Orwell. Transmitted on 1st January 1984 (for obvious reasons) primarily between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it was intended as a rebuttal to Orwell's vision, by showing that technological advance is no bad thing. Try telling that to a typical Daily Mail journalist (I'm sure the left-leaning Orwell would be dismayed to find his book become such fodder for those loons). Alongside Anderson and Gabriel, the broadcast featured live and recorded work from the likes of John Cage, Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg (with Arthur Russell on cello), Merce Cunningham, Oingo Boingo and The Thompson Twins.
Orwell's 1984 was of course even more explicitly acknowledged in 1984 with the release of the John Hurt/Richard Burton-starring film version of the book, complete with Eurythmics soundtrack.
Renowned mentalist Fever Ray is soon to release a cover of Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street, this being the year that Gabriel released Scratch My Back, an album of orchestral-and-vocal covers of 12 artists, with an intended sister-release, I'll Scratch Yours, in which the artists each cover one of his songs.
Trouble is, Peter Gabriel covered neither Fever Ray, nor Karin Dreijer Andersson's more famous band, The Knife. It's a tad ironic that someone would voluntarily choose to cover one of his songs, when he has had difficulty getting some artists to return the favour for his own project. While some (Stephen Merritt, David Byrne, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Bon Iver, Elbow) have recorded tracks (released as double a-sides with the corresponding track on Scratch My Back), others (reportedly David Bowie, Radiohead, The Arcade Fire) have been a little less forthcoming. Of those released, Lou Reed's distortion-drenched version of Solsbury Hill is a clear winner, which is rather apt given that Gabriel and Reed's wife Laurie Anderson once scratched one another's backs when Gabriel did guest vocals on Excellent Birds on Anderson's Mister Heartbreak, which later appeared in a different arrangement on Gabriel's So.
It's long perplexed me that Gabriel does not receive as much hipster kudos as other contemparaneous artists, with his often dark, bleak, paranoid masterpiece third self-titled album deserves to be a revivalist hit on a par with Paul Simon's Graceland or Talking Heads' Remain In Light. Perhaps this is because of many people's (clearly misplaced) misgivings about Genesis or his mega-success with So tying him to the 80s, particularly embedded in the famous boombox raised aloft scene in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything (I feel that in real life Lloyd Dobler would have received a restraining order). My feeling was that perhaps the Scratch My Back/I'll Scratch Yours project would correct this, though its apparent failings point to no. Perhaps the Fever Ray effect will be a winner though. At the very least we can agree it's preferable to Bon Iver.
While watching Beyond The Lighted Stage (the Rush documentary) the other day, I caught a bit of the video for Time Stand Still for the first time. I've actually got the Rush videography on DVD, but I guess I never got as far as this because it's from about the period that I lose interest in Rush (the back end of their New Wave-y material and before their current hard rock sound). Time Stand Still is a tune, mind.
Anyway, the video's bleeding awful, its effects are horribly dated, to the point that you wonder if they ever even looked good at the time. I was surprised then to find out that the video was directed by Zbigniew Rybczynski, who directed this great video for the Art of Noise's Close (To The Edit).
He also directed the video for Stereotomy by The Alan Parsons Project, which, while also fairly dated, actually manages to look quite good, and work well with the music.
He was also co-writer, editor and cinematographer of Gerald Kargl's serial killer movie Angst, which is bloody terrific. The film has been a big influence on Gaspar Noé (particularly Seul Contre Tous aka I Stand Alone), and features a cracking soundtrack by Klaus Schulze.
Been listening to a lot of The KLF recently, taking in full albums and watching quite a bit of online (i.e. Youtube) footage of their music videos, TOTP performances and original video pieces (below).
I'm sure everyone knows enough about them to justify me not writing a full article, (the wikipedia page sums up everything succinctly enough) but I'm still really fascinated and taken aback by a lot of the bands work both musical and not. The production on their records alone is so alien to what I'm used to hearing that it really seems completely foreign and bizarre. I find myself asking just how something like The KLF ever existed and was so widely experimental yet commercially successful at the same time.
That whole era of late 80's/early 90's in fact just seems like a totally different world to me more so than the 60 or early 80s, maybe because the BBC haven't made a slightly comical idiosyncratic period drama starring Judie Dench or Martin Freeman based on that time yet. I remember I went to a talk by Gavin Watson recently about his new(ish) book Ravin' 89 and having that same feeling of what the hell was going on with these people exactly. I do find myself struggling a lot with 90's pop culture in general, mainly in Britian (not that I'm letting Grunge off the hook) - just makes me think of black berets, The Tube, black leggings, The Word and numerous other awful fashion choices and televisions programs. Really makes me dread the inevitable 90's comeback that's already in semi swing, Chris Evans's Omen-like rise through the ranks of Radio 2 being a portent for the horror that'll unfold (up date perhaps not!).
I do sometimes wonder whether I would have liked a band like The KLF had I been the age I am now during their heyday, same with other genres/scenes like Chicago House, The Beatles, Punk, Juke (oh wait that's now). Would I have been able to enjoy them in the context of the times or would I have rejected it due to overexposure or something else like disliking the majority of people who were fans also. I suppose there's no real point thinking about it, and I should just appreciate that I get to enjoy all this great music, free of context, peer pressure and well actually literally free also. Everything's available to everyone essentially. Kanye West made an interesting speech on a sort of similar subject recently at Rolling Stone (here) talking about making music that's popular and how the underground is no longer the avant-garde due to this ease of access.
But back to The KLF, as it's pretty easy to be enamoured with them, their use of samples, visual aesthetic, philosophy (if you could call it that), publicity stunts and range of output over the course of their career is inspiring, as is their savvy-marketing technique of constantly repeating their own name during songs. must start doing that myself.
Always worth a watch is the 1992 Brit Award performance of the KLF with Extreme Noise Terror during which Bill Drummond fired machine gun blanks into the audience.
As exceptional as that might have been, more shocking to my eyes events occurred on that night, as this video below shows - the KLF somehow managed to tie with Simply Red in the category for 'Best British Band', but more importantly host 'Martika' is seen smoking onstage whilst presenting the award, on television, in an enclosed public space, with four or more walls. The early 90's must have been a very different world indeed.
Extra have a new range of mints out in shops, so new in fact that I can't even find a stock image of them on the internet. They're similar to their chewing gum counterpart in packaging and flavours, so much so that accidentally I picked a multipack thinking it was the standard wonderful Extra (rememeber the days when Orbit was the shit? and on that note those tedious Trident adverts). Word to the wise though, the small print on the back mentions that these new mints 'may cause laxative effects' - they should probably drop the 'may'.
If you know anything about the crystal world you'll know how ecstatic I was to wake up to this package of records this morning. Sure we'll have a proper write up on Oldfield soon, or at the very least on Pictures in the Dark.
I also happened to do this blogspot entirely on my mobile phone. Tower of Babel man.
When I was about to head home the other day, I bumped into a friend who asked if I'd like to join in on an impromptu ride in the countryside around Nottingham, and lacking any reasonable excuse not to, I did. While it was a thoroughly enjoyable ride, unfortunately I bonked on the hills towards the end - beset by muscle fatigue, I struggled to turn the pedals at a decent pace. Seeing David Millar also bonk in the British Road Race Championships on Sunday offered me some comfort, though I think we both would've been better off had we watched this cracking film made by the British Rail film board in 1955, and heeded the advice at the beginning of the second part.
Above are just a few of serial killer Rodney Alcala's 2,000 plus collection of photographs he took of various women, girls and sometimes boys during the 1970s.
I came upon the photos earlier in the year when Californian Police released them to the press and public in the hopes of finding information about the subjects involved, believing there to be further unreported victims within the set of portraits .
The images offer up a snapshot of distinctly 70s fashion and film aesthetics as well as a feeling of stunningly intense intimacy, giving you a glimpse into the mind and life of this perverted man. Yet behind all the beauty to them they serve as a cold and sobering reminder of the fine line between affinity and obsession and the horrific acts that human beings can commit against each other.
Though sentenced to death in March for the murder of Robin Samsoe in 1979 and four other accounts of homicide (read the official report here) investigative estimates put Alcala's crimes of torture, rape, assault and kidnapping anywhere from 30 to 50 to even 100 cases spanning several years and different states across America.
You can sense the distress and desperation the Police are faced with when trying to tackle the sheer expanse of his crimes when you get quotes from his prosecutor Orange County DDA Matt Murphy, simply exhaling out comments like 'God only knows how many people he killed'.
Due to his confident rapour with women and brutal psychotic violence of his acts Alcala has been compared to the serial killer Tim Bundy and was also sometimes dubbed the 'Dating Game Killer' by the media due to a 1979 spot on the USA equivalent of Blind Date 'The Dating Show'. Joining Steve Martin and Michael Jackson in the list of notable alumni from the TV series (fyi the former is genuinely funny and entertaining, the latter's tragic then quite sweet, then tragic again).
