After some recent posts about the Summer of Love, Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Swinging London this video caught my eye while I was working on sprucing up my YouTube Channel. You could paint a pretty full picture of the Summer of Love and the culture it inspired just looking at drugs and the Vietnam War. Of course drugs and war were nothing new in 1967, and LSD and marijuana were just the latest forms of mind-expansion for the contemporaneous iterations of humanities most ancient poets, philosophers, visionaries and mystics.

In The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna wrote:

And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are.

Here’s a trippy documentary tracing human appetites for altered states from the Dawn of Man to the present…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.

A few years ago I stumbled across this biopic about The Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones: Stoned tells the story about the British rockers with an eye on their multi-instrumentalist and original leader. Before Mick and Keith became the Glimmer Twins, The Rolling Stones were Brian’s band. The story goes that Brian got deep into drugs before he was unable to call upon his preternatural musical talents in the recording studio. Add to Jones’ decline the emergence of Mick and Keith as an original songwriting team, and Keith’s stealing Brian’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, and maybe it wasn’t very surprising that Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool after he was fired from the band.

Here are a few words from the Wiki…

Original Rolling Stones bass guitarist Bill Wyman said of Jones, “He formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs. … he was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it – highly intelligent – and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away.”

At around midnight on the night of 2–3 July 1969, Jones was discovered motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm. His Swedish girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, was convinced Jones was alive when he was taken out of the pool, insisting he still had a pulse. However, by the time the doctors arrived it was too late and he was pronounced dead. The coroner’s report stated “death by misadventure” and noted his liver and heart were heavily enlarged by drug and alcohol abuse.

Here’s the thing: Stoned is a conspiracy movie at heart:

Stoned, also known as The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones in the UK, is a 2005 film about Brian Jones, one of the founding members of The Rolling Stones. The film explores the idea that Jones was murdered by Frank Thorogood, a builder hired to renovate Jones’s Cotchford Farm in East Sussex. The film also illuminates Jones’s use of alcohol and drugs, and his relationship with Anita Pallenberg.

Anita Pallenberg’s passing on June 13, makes Stoned‘s YouTube presence timelessly timely. Here’s Stoned…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

Today we celebrate the 1944 birthday of model, actress and Rolling Stones’ muse Anita Pallenberg. Pallenberg was Brian Jones’ girlfriend before he destroyed himself with drugs and she hooked-up with Keith, during which time she filmed the infamous love scenes in Performance with Mick Jagger.

Performance is a landmark psycho/sexual/crime drama masterpiece by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. Here’s the Wiki…

On its release the film received mixed reviews. Most reviewers focused on the graphic sexual elements. One reviewer (Richard Schickel) described it as “the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing.” In the late 1970s and 1980s, Performance gradually acquired a cult following on the late night and repertory cinema circuits. By the 1990s, the film had undergone a critical reappraisal. In 1995 Performance appeared at number 30 in a Time Out magazine “all-time greats” poll of critics and directors.[4] After Cammell’s death in 1996, the film’s reputation grew still further. It is often cited as a classic of British cinema.

In the September–October 2009 issue of Film Comment, Mick Jagger’s Turner was voted the best performance by a musician in a film.[5]

In his 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins says: “Performance was not only the greatest seventies film about identity, if any movie in the whole Story of Film should be compulsory viewing for film makers, maybe this is it.”

Here’s the best version of Performance I could find on YouTube. NSFW…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts

Brian Jones is dead. He drowned in his pool in the aftermath of being kicked out of the band. The facts are fuzzy and there’s reason to believe that he may have been the victim of foul play. Brian was a symbol of peace and love, and his passion for the blues will live on in the amazing music he brought to the band that he created.

Here’s a late breaking report…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts

Celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain recently premiered his new show on CNN. The title of Parts Unknown references both the remote locations the show seems to focus on as well as the odd bits of fruits, veggies and animals that make their way into the more exotic dishes Bourdain puts on display. The title also has a hint of ominousness to it and it’s these dark overtones that tell you Bourdain is really on to something, here.

Fans of No Reservations will find plenty to like here, but fans of particular episodes of Bourdain’s former, famous Travel Channel show will be especially pleased. For me, No Reservations was at its best when the places were gritty and the stories Bourdain uncovered were dark and deeply human – episodes from Columbia, Laos and Lebanon all leap to mind.

The first handful of episodes from Parts Unknown are packed with Bourdain at his edgy best: He recalls the destructiveness of the L.A. Riots in an episode focused on the city’s Koreatown neighborhood; he illuminates the violence and oppression in present-day Myanmar; he returns to Columbia.

In my favorite episode yet, Bourdain visits Morocco, comparing the present-day country and the city of Tangier to their counter-cultural legends, illuminating the lives and works of artists like Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Brian Jones and the Master Musicians of Jujuka along the way. Oh, yeah! Bourdain even schools you on how to make homemade majoun. If you don’t know what majoun is, you really need to watch this video.

Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube Channel to access an archive of all the videos I curate on the blog.

Stay Awake!

Nico was a fashion model, an actress and a siger/songwriter who is best known for her time with The Velvet Underground and her contributions to their debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico. The Warhol Superstar is familiar to cinephiles for her gorgeous turns in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.

Christa Päffgen was born in Nazi Germany in 1938. Her father was killed in the war. By the age of 13, she had quit school to sell lingerie. At 5′ 10″ with outrageous cheekbones, she was a star model on the rise while still in her teens.

While taking acting lessons in New York with Lee Strasberg, Nico met rockers like Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Jimmy Page produced her first single and Bob Dylan wrote the song “I’ll Keep it with Mine” for her to perform. An introduction from Jones got Nico into Warhol’s inner circle and the rest is history.

While many are familiar with the first half of Nico’s story, not as many know much at all about the rest of her life. Nico’s solo musical career is full of courageous experimentation and her refusal to be just another pretty face is admirable even by today’s standards. Her drug problems are the stuff of legend and her strange death wraps even the end of her tale in an air of mystery.

Susan Ofteringer’s film Nico Icon sheds light on all of this and more. This rather heavy-handed plot summary at IMDB says it all:

A look into the many lives of Christa Päffgen, otherwise known as Nico; from cutie German mädchen to the first of the supermodels, to glamorous diva of the Velvet Underground, to cult item, junkie and hag. Many faces for the same woman, whom, you realize, just couldn’t bring herself to care enough to live.

Here is the film in its entirety. Highlights include early images of Nico as a young model, the origin of her famous name, lots of post-Velvets interview and performance footage of the chanteuse, and a moving homage by friend/bandmate/producer John Cale who closes the film playing piano in front of two massive Julian Schnabel paintings, giving a haunting recitation of the Nico classic “Frozen Warnings.”

Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel to access an archive of all the videos I curate on the blog.

Stay Awake!