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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Last night I hit the Nashville Film Festival for their 8 P.M. screening of the Frayed Shorts program. Every year the Frayed Shorts selections celebrate abbreviated gross-outs, small scares, small sized celebrations of sex, and tiny terrors. After a go for broke introduction by Jason Shawhan — is anyone better? — we were off and running into a wide variety of films that elicited very different responses from the audience.

“The Call of Charlie” is a “fish” out of water tale that re-imagines H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu as a mid-level office drone who needs to get set up on blind dates. The makeup effects are pretty good in this one and the mix of ridiculous humor and bloody gore is pretty perfect. Lovecraft has proven to be challenging to translate to screen, but this rom-com works much better than most adaptations precisely because of its irreverent take on Lovecraft’s mythos.

“Pearlies” turns the Tooth Fairy story into a horror tale about an evil little tooth-collecting German rat. The effects here are really well done, and there’s even a Poltergeist reference for the keen-eyed. If you like monster movies and scary fairy tales this one really delivered.

“Summer’s Puke is Winter’s Delight” by Sawako Kabuki is a crudely rendered pornographic cartoon set to a soundtrack of the sound of people throwing up. It made me so queasy I had to plug my ears as best I could. I wouldn’t want to watch this one again, but I have to believe this was exactly the effect the director was hoping for. Bravo.

Renata Gasiorowska’s “Pussy” is a simple animated story about a single girl at home trying to masturbate. She experiences a few funny fails before the titular part detaches from her body and begins running around her apartment building. After a bit of slapstick chaos the two come to an agreement: the girl writhes on the floor while her pussy runs all over the house rubbing up against candle sticks, rolling around in the soft bristles of a brush, and running beneath the tassels hanging from the edge of some furniture upholstery. The best part of the film is its chromatic, psychedelic climax. Of course, this is one Frayed Short with a happy ending.

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Philip Levine, poet and son of Detroit, died on Valentine’s Day. He was an accomplished man who’d lived a long life, but anytime we lose a voice like his the silence it leaves behind is a roaring one. Levine’s poetry reached back to William Carlos Williams’ confrontations with the blunt facts of reality, and the cosmic democracy of Walt Whitman to fashion a contemporary verse that celebrated “the small heroics of getting through the day when the day doesn’t give a shit.”

Here’s a great clip of the great man from the Anarchism in America documentary…

Here’s one of the poet’s classics, from the Poetry Foundation…

What Work Is
BY PHILIP LEVINE

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

Stay Awake!

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The latest documentary by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog doesn’t examine the life of some extraordinary outsider or recast found-footage into an idiosyncratic, philosophical narrative. What’s most surprising about this latest project is that it’s essentially a PSA, but, of course, one executed with the poetry and illumination we’ve come to expect from the master.

Described as “haunting,” this short documentary is titled From One Second to the Next, it will be shown in high schools and safety organizations across the country.

Slate has the inside scoop:

“From One Second to the Next,” the rather unlikely film below, came together when AT&T approached the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog and asked if he would direct a series of short films warning people about the dangers of texting while driving.

The result is haunting. It focuses on four accidents, some of them fatal, and Herzog aims his camera squarely at the faces of both victims and perpetrators, asking them to describe in detail what happened and the aftermath.

Watch the full film below.

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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.”

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Stay Awake!