A slinky, sneaky, lurid, brassy adieu to Mr. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang – composer John Barry, who died this week. A fine profile from a few years ago, in Vanity Fair, here.
Table of Contents: > Transmissions
Additional Inquiries
…and, after several additional inquiries, Officer Welch and I returned to the Magic Garden and questioned Rainbow, princess of the Super-Fairies again. She remained a tight-lipped and difficult witness, repeatedly insisting her glitter wand was ornamental and had no magic properties. (or, holy moly – I really dig my new macro SLR lens…)
For Your Pleasure, 2010
OFF!, in which the Circle Jerks’ Keith Morris, 55, records the de facto sequel to Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown EP 32 years later – proving just how elusive pure punk is, creating a flat-out total work of art, and this year’s best record. The irrepressible egghead’s Small Craft on a Milk Sea has this year’s best title and a suite of exquisite ambient constructions, of which “2 Forms of Anger” is the “loud one.”
Of Montreal’s False Priest was a flamboyant mess sloshing around the precision glam of Coquet Coquette – my favorite song of the year. “Silver Jenny Dollar” is a cat’s cradle of baroque obliqueness from Dan Bejar, this time with loungy doo-wop whoah whoahs – the high point of the otherwise okie doke New Pornographers disc, Together. (Thanks as well, New Pornos, for the tip-offs on Outrageous Cherry and Circle C – the northern lands do hold obscure and wonderful mysteries.)
The 40 years that separate the hand crafted psych of Kelley Stoltz and Big Boy Pete mean little – fitting then that these two consummate craftsmen have found each other. Their co-recording of Pete’s “Baby I’ve Got News For You” anchors Kelley’s uniformly excellent To Dreamers.
Bless you, whoever finally digitized “Magnetic Shoes,” a one and a half minute spray of power pop silly string that ruled my Walkman in high school. “The Day the Earth Stalled” and “Diego Garcia” are ace sides from old heads… The Psychedelic Furs played the best show I saw this year; honorable, too, going out like they came in, playing blistering sets in smaller halls, rather than jiving for tourists at casinos.
You are a talented man Mr. Murphy. Good to have you back Mr. Foxx.
Music Go Music? Melodramatic Scandinavian pop, shot through with heavy doses of prog, and alternating between pulsing euro disco and lush orchestrated pop – recorded in 2008, released in 2009, discovered in 2010, and my most favorite new band in ages…
I developed a weakness this year for what Robert Christgau, in a helplessly admiring review of Quarterflash’s 1981 debut, called “music for stewardesses.” “Goodbye To You” is a prime example of the form and its enduring awesomeness needs no further annotation.
Thank you Roky, for returning, and Captain, for being.
DOWNLOAD THE COMP, HERE. Happy New Year!
Seasons, Merry, Best, Etc…
Happy, etc…, to you and yours over the holidays. I’ll leave you with some remarkable photographs by Matthias Heiderich, a young photographer and musician based in Berlin. I stumbled across his Flickr stream the other night and was floored – warmth and emotion paired with abstract geometries and chilly ambiance. Take a moment and treat yourselves to more of his work, here. Sometime next week, I’ll post 2010’s For Your Pleasure… a download-able mix of my year in music. Then onto 2011. ‘Til then, then…
Just a few more days…
Onward and upward, etc…
Rex Reed and Raquel Welch on the set of Myra Breckinridge. Those looks of concern and finger gnawing anxiety? They’re watching a zonked, manic director losing control amidst an anarchic shoot coming apart at the seams. Originally, I filed this photo away for the blog simply for it’s stylishness, and the opportunity to reference the legendarily disastrous filming. But the after three weeks of technical glitches, Tumblr disconnects, posting delays, hacked code, and Google-robot imposed Internet blacklist, I’m starting to relate to it a bit more personally.
As in many seemingly hopeless situations, however, inspiration can be found in Welch – who dusted herself off from this debacle, and was soon again in top form, appearing in Richard Lester’s bawdy, exuberant adaptation of the Three Musketeers. So, then, as goes Miss Welch, so goes the blog – onward and upward…
The Malware Saga
Ok. That totally sucked. Here’s the skinny. The site got hacked early this week. Infected with bad code, malware, general hacker obnoxiousness. So the site was chloroformed, quarantined, and branded an “attack site” by Google… arrgh! A few frantic days later, with considerable help from my superb hosting service, pair.com, the WordPress community, and after a total reinstall of the blog, it’s all sorted. phew… Google has released the blog back into the general population…
The whole experience was galvanizing. First off, for anyone with any kind of a Internet presence – seriously – get to know the details of your security, and make sure it’s tight. Slightly paranoid geek tight, not 70’s suburban bicycle chain tight. The weird thing, though, was dealing with Google. !#@!$@! It underscored how much power they have over our online lives and I’ll tell you, it was disconcerting. I’m going to post on this aspect of the magilla in a few days once I have my thoughts together, but it had a real Soviet Logan’s Run Smiling Robot Takeover Westworld kinda feeling… more soon.
Welcome back.
I Want to Believe
Uppercase Magazine #6
I staged these UFO photographs in the late 70s, when I was 9 or so, on the front lawn of my childhood home in Liverpool, New York. When I look at these images now, they never fail to spark a small reverie — a welcome wormhole into kidhood.
Like the photos themselves, which have yellowed & faded with age, my affinity for the images has mellowed & deepened over the years. Now I think I’m as taken with the notion of staging UFO pictures as the idea of UFOs themselves.
I think the photos capture a profound human dynamic —inventing & crafting our own fantasies, while the same time ardently longing that they actually be true. Dwelling amid the tension is much more satisfying, ultimately, than being either a gimlet eyed rationalist or a wide-eyed true believer.
Stand By… Stand By…
Heavy advertising, etc., for the rest of the week so the blog’ll be on the auto-pilot. Till next week then, and we’ll pick up where we left off….
Pardon our dust…
Reader! Casual visitor! Information collecting robot with a stealth marketing agenda! Over the next couple of days the blog will be undergoing some remodeling. The big change is the addition of a tumblr feed over there on your buy vicodin canada online left… It will be a sketch-booky type thing, a place for quick hits, one-offs, odds & sods. During the jury-rigging stuff will blink in and out, flicker, and sputter. Posts will continue as usual. Enjoy
Springtime = Weber’s
Hooray! The weather has turned, spring sprung, etc… which means, once again, Weber’s is on the menu! Not just an orange Doo Wop-style car hop with a mechanized retro asterisk sign serving simple burgers and home made root beer, but a roadside oasis and an enduring buy vicodin from canada monument to warm weather good times. Route 38 in Cherry Hill, in lovely southern New Jersey.
(These photos were shot a couple of years ago with the Savoy, below, a corker of a fixed focus medium format plastic toy camera.)
The Valkyrie
Re-Runs
Still buried deep in the sequin mines. Sigh. As such, it’s re-runs all week, featuring posts from the blog’s struggling first season.
Let it snow…
Just gorgeous! Brian Stauffer’s lovely, evocative, spare drawing for the March 1, 2010 cover of the New Yorker.
Djer Kiss
Reader! May your weekend be as light, refreshing, and effervescent as the sensation of Djer Kiss talcum powder, which, if you can trust the depiction above, feels like the condensed essence of an idyllic verdant garden at the foot of a towering magic castle from which issue 38 faeries, attended by 3 mischievous cherubs, all luxuriating in a river of flowers…. ‘Till next week then…
Love Is Now!
I know, Hallmark® holiday, yes, yes… still, love’s rad. Happy Valentines Day, all…
Where were we?
‘Aight… once more with feeling. And, as always, with an eye for something fetching. Well fortified over the holiday break. Visits to two crackerjack museums: first to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where I was blown away by Birth of the Cool, the Barkley L. Hendricks retrospective; then to the Brandywine River Museum, for the Wyeths of course, but also for a little jewel of a show – a survey of illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.
Books too; finally scored Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz – the single best LA writer writing about LA ever, also Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby a pioneering black & white strip comic, Nell Brinkley’s effervescent flappers, and Exposed, a survey of the Victorian nude published a few years back. Other radness: The paintings of William Merrit Chase, some spellbinding and uncannily modern illustrations for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , Godard’s pop headcratcher flick Made in USA…
Also, a big new gouache completed at long last. Scores galore while visiting family HQ… old slide rule manuals (see above), a passel of old scientific tracing templates, a collection of precision tweezers, and the germ of giant new project of moon shot proportions. More soon, like tomorrow, with covers from the 70’s toddler edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or maybe the gouache. We’ll see.
(Jessie Wilcox Smith, Alice in Wonderland, 1923)