Came across this lollipop culture candy the other day and wanted to share here. I hope the new year is as absurd and unexpected as this. Here’s the set-up from Open Culture…

When it comes to music however, 80s retro tends to confine themselves to early hip and hop and electro, the synthpop of Gary Numan and Duran Duran or the cheesy hair metal of Mötley Crüe. But this lens misses the significant 60s revivalism that emerged at the time. Garage, surf, and psych rock and the jangly sounds of The Byrds inspired R.E.M., the B52s, the Replacements, the House of Love, and the Fleshtones, a much lesser-known NYC band who may never have gotten their commercial due, but who certainly appealed to 60s art star Andy Warhol.

When Warhol remade himself as a TV personality in the 80s with his MTV variety show Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes he cast the Fleshtones as the backing band for rising theater and film star Ian McKellen, a match-up that represents another hallmark of 80s pop culture—the postmodern juxtaposition of genres, styles, and registers which Warhol helped pioneer 20 years earlier when he brought kitschy silk-screened soup cans, sexy street hustlers, and the Velvet Underground into the art scene.

Warhol’s television work turned this impulse into a multimedia circus featuring “The high and the low. The rich and the famous. The struggling artists and the rising stars,” as Warhol Museum curator Geralyn Huxley puts it. In this particularly fitting example, McKellen and the Fleshtones bring Shakespeare’s racy Sonnet 20 to young, hip MTV audiences in 1987. L.A. Weekly lists a few of the “cool points” from the clip:

A young, hot, already insanely talented Ian McKellen
Wearing awesome New Wave fashions
At Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1987
Backed by cult group the Fleshtones
Reciting a Shakespeare Sonnet

Here’s the video…

Stay Awake,

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Back in May I wrote a bunch of posts about the 50th anniversary of the Velvet Underground’s debut album. Here’s another Velvety post, celebrating the great John Cale. Here’s the word from a recent Rolling Stone interview celebrating the anniversary…

The way John Cale tells it, he had a revelation one day in the mid-Sixties. He’d dedicated the majority of his first two decades to classical and avant-garde music, to such an extent that, he says dryly, “I may have missed out on my puberty.

“I woke up one day and said, ‘Wait a minute, there are people running around singing Beatles songs,’” he recalls. “The Beatles Invasion was going on. All the enjoyment that I’d gotten as a kid out of rock & roll was receding, and I thought, ‘Let’s put something together that blends the two.’ I wanted to cross-pollinate rock with the avant-garde, and then I met Lou Reed, and that was the solution.”

The union of Cale’s musical wanderlust, spurred on by collaborating with minimalist composer La Monte Young, and Reed’s rock-steady songwriting, which he had been exercising as an in-house songwriter at Pickwick Records, became the soul of the Velvet Underground. This weekend will mark the 50th anniversary of their most daring experiment – their debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico – the Andy Warhol–produced LP that found Cale, Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker fusing gritty garage rock with overdriven viola noise and, on some songs, the lilting, expressionistic vocals of German chanteuse Nico.

The record, whose songs vividly described drug abuse and sexual deviance at a time when the Beatles were dominating the charts with a gentler, more whimsical countercultural vision, was far from a commercial hit, but its influence over the past half century has been undeniable. Artists ranging from David Bowie to Duran Duran have covered its songs, and Brian Eno is fabled to have once said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

Read the whole article at the link above and watch this documentary to find out more about Cale’s extraordinary career in the Velvets and beyond…

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Back on track with my site live again, and keeping good to my word about celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground and Nico, here’s a short documentary film that brings viewers as close as they can come to getting their hands on a ticket to Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It’s important to remember that The Velvet Underground were originally one element in a multimedia extravaganza that included pioneering light displays, dancers and very very loud music. Here’s the word from UBUWEB…

Title: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground
Director: Ronald Nameth
Show Co-ordinator: Paul Morrisey
Lights: Dan Williams
Sound: David Faison

Music: The Velvet Underground & Nico, I’ll Be Your Mirror and European Son from The Velvet Underground & Nico LP and It Was a Pleasure Then from Nico’s Chelsea Girl LP, and two live songs from the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at Poor Richard’s, 1363 No. Sedgwick, Chicago, 1966/06/23, Heroin [5:14] and Venus In Furs [3:24]. That show was without Lou Reed who was at New York’s Beth Israel Hospital for hepatitis, and without Nico who took off for Ibiza at the beginning of June. John Cale on lead vocals and keyboards, drums, Sterling Morrison on guitar, Maureen Tucker on bass, and Angus MacLise was on drums.
Running Time: 22 minutes (long version)/12 minutes (short version)
Release Date: 1966-08-00 [US]
Cast: The Velvet Underground & Nico: John Cale (vocals, organ), Sterling Morrison (rhythm guitar), Maureen Tucker (bass guitar), Angus McLise (drums)
Gerard Malanga: Dancer
Ingrid Superstar: Dancer
Susan Pile
Edward Walsh

Note: An alternate version of this film was broadcasted on French TV channel Canal + on 1990-08-26. That version is edited to 12 minutes and the soundtrack is different: Venus In Furs [3:57] and Heroin [3:19] are not the versions sung by John Cale but those from the Columbus Valleydale Ballroom 1966-11-04 tape. Credits titles are also different (John Cale’s name appears correctly spelled even though it was mispelled as ‘John Cahill’ in the 22-min version). It was this shortened version which was shown at the Fondation Cartier exhibition in Jouy-En-Josas on 1990-06-15 and is available on the Re:Voir VHS.

Andy Warhol’s hellish sensorium, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the Fillmore/Electric Circus era, and it is safe to say that the EPI has never been equaled. Similarly, Ronald Nameth’s cinematic homage to the EPI stands as a parangon of excellence in the kinetic rock-show ganre. Nameth, a colleague of John Cage in several mixed-media environments at the University of Illinois, managed to transform his film into something far more than a mere record of an event. Like Warhol’s show, Nameth’s EPI is an experience, not an idea.

Here’s the film…

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Burroughs: The Movie is a 1983 documentary by Howard Brookner about the author William S. Burroughs. Brookner shot the film for five years with Burroughs’ full cooperation. The two became good friends before Brookner died of AIDS in 1989. In 2012 Brookner’s archive was discovered in a variety of locations, and the filmmaker’s nephew, Aaron Brookner, oversaw the restoration of the Burroughs film including the recovery of never-before-seen interviews with the likes of Andy Warhol and others. That film was re-released last year to coincide with the Burroughs Centenary. This year, Aaron is premiering his own film about his uncle and his work at Sundance, and the trailer for Uncle Howard reads like hanging out in the greatest scene in New York’s late 1970′s and early 1980′s…

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Warhol Superstar Joe Dallesandro made his name as an actor in Warhol productions like Flesh and Trash before finding more mainstream success in supporting roles like playing Lucky Luciano in The Cotton Club. Dallesandro is the “Little Joe” in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wildside,” and that’s his zippable fly on the cover of the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album.

Today we celebrate Joe’s birthday on December 31, 1948. Here’s a NSFW tribute to Little Joe…

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April in America is National Poetry Month. Reminded of this today, I immediately thought of Jim Carroll – a prodigy of verse whose hybrid poetic memoirs are required reading for anyone interested in punk era New York city and the decades that followed before Carroll’s death in 2009. Carroll’s musical releases are well-worth a listen, but this post will focus on his written work. here’s the Wiki…

While still in high school, Carroll published his first collection of poems, Organic Trains. Already attracting the attention of the local literati, his work began appearing in the Poetry Project’s magazine The World in 1967. Soon his work was being published in elite literary magazines like Paris Review in 1968,[2] and Poetry the following year. In 1970, his second collection of poems, 4 Ups and 1 Down was published, and he started working for Andy Warhol. At first, he was writing film dialogue and inventing character names; later on, Carroll worked as the co-manager of Warhol’s Theater. Carroll’s first publication by a mainstream publisher (Grossman Publishers), the poetry collection Living at the Movies, was published in 1973.

In 1978, Carroll published The Basketball Diaries, an autobiographical book concerning his life as a teenager in New York City’s hard drug culture. Diaries is an edited collection of the diaries he kept between the ages of 12 and 16, detailing his sexual experiences, high school basketball career, and his addiction to heroin, which began when he was 13.

In 1987, Carroll wrote a second memoir, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971–1973, continuing his autobiography into his early adulthood in the New York City music and art scene as well as his struggle to kick his drug habit.

After working as a musician, Carroll returned to writing full-time in the mid-1980s and began to appear regularly on the spoken-word circuit. Starting in 1991, Carroll performed readings from his then-in-progress first novel, The Petting Zoo.

Here’s a long interview with Carroll from 1998…

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1965, 50 years ago, was a big year for Andy Warhol, the filmmaker: He met Edie Sedgwick who starred in one of his best films, that year’s Poor Little Rich Girl. He also began collaborating with Paul Morrissey who helped Warhol take his cinematic ambitions to another level. Things were going so well behind the camera that Warhol announced his retirement from painting — at least for a little while.

One good turn deserves another, and as we recognize this important period in the artist’s journey as a movie maven, here’s an epic, nearly four hour documentary about the man behind the soup can…

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By 1964, Andy Warhol had already been recognized as a painter of Campbell’s Soup cans, money and Marilyn, but his auspicious entry into the art world only served to put more pressure on his first New York City gallery opening at Leo Castelli.

The gallery had opened a new show of Warhol’s Death and Disaster paintings in Paris, but the series’ grim subject matter didn’t seem to appeal to the tastes in NYC so Warhol planted his tongue firmly in his cheek and produced a series of repetitious, painted screen-prints of flowers that filled the gallery like a memorial service at a funeral — Warhol got the last laugh, offering the other side of the same grisly coin that NYC audiences weren’t ready for.

The show was a rousing success. Fifty years on, The Andy Warhol Museum is touring an exhibition of the flowers which are currently hanging at Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, TN.

Here is a Sotheby’s video that recounts the origins of the iconic series…

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Warhol’s greatest contribution was his democratizing of fine art by claiming a space for consumer packaging — like Brillo boxes and Campbell’s Soup labels — in a museum setting.

Now, a new line of toys made in his likeness returns the favor. Medicom Toy is celebrating the artist on the occasion of his 15 Minutes Eternal retrospective in Japan with a line of its Bearbricks and two stand-alone figures that capture the iconic look of the artist and his art.

Have a look…

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Filmmaker, Emile de Antonio is a counterculture hero who helped to distribute the classic Beat film Pull My Daisy, shot the classic JFK assassination documentary Rush to Judgement and got smashed to the gills for his appearance in Andy Warhol’s experimental film Drink.

One of my favorite de Antonio flicks is a classic art documentary featuring candid interviews with a generation of painters, allowing them to illuminate the evolution of modern art in America in their own works and words.

Here’s Open Culture’s take on the film Painters Painting:

For his 1972 movie Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970, De Antonio managed to get artists like Warhol, Johns, and De Kooning along with Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler to talk about their craft. It is the definitive documentary portrait of the New York art world.

I was probably the only filmmaker in the world who could [have made Painters Painting] because I knew all those people, from the time that they were poor, and unsuccessful and had no money. I knew Warhol and Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Stella before they ever sold a painting, and so it was interesting to [do the film about them]. They appeared in the film along with De Kooning, whom I knew very well, and Barnett Newman, who is now dead. They talked to me in a way that they would never have talked to anybody else because they knew I knew the subject.

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