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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Last week I finally got around to posting about Jean-Luc Godard’s 87th birthday, and today Open Culture reminded me how rich the master’s collection of odds-and-ends shorts and clips can be. In 1968, Godard shot Jefferson Airplane performing live on a rooftop in Manhattan. Godard’s film features a performance of “The House at Pooneil Corners,” and footage of the band’s inevitable arrest. Here’s a bit from Open Culture and my favorite living film critic, Richard Brody…

“He took over from the specialists and operated the camera from the window of Leacock-Pennebaker’s office on West Forty-fifth street, shooting the band on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel across the street. (Pennebaker recalled him to be an amateurish cameraman who could not avoid the beginner’s pitfall of frequent zooming in and out.) The performance took place without a permit, at standard rock volume: as singer Grace Slick later wrote, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist…”

Amateurish or not, a piece of the footage has surfaced on YouTube. Listen to the Airplane perform “The House at Pooneil Corners,” watch Godard’s dramatic swings of focus and zoom as he attempts to convey the spectacle of the band and the spectacle of countless surprised Manhattanites at once, and think for yourself about this peculiar intersection of two bold lines in the era’s alternative zeitgeist. As Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner said in a 1986 interview, “Just for a while there, maybe for about 25 minutes in 1967, everything was perfect.” But these seven minutes in November 1968, from opening shouts to inevitable arrest, don’t seem so dull themselves.

Check out the short here…

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Last Friday I was posting the latest From the Archives pick when I read about Glenn O’Brien’s passing in The Guardian. Here’s the word…

Glenn O’Brien, the New York cultural figure who was an author, musician, magazine editor, style guru, TV host and key figure at Andy Warhol’s Factory, has died aged 70.

Described by Rolling Stone, one of the publications he edited along with Warhol’s Interview, as a “renaissance man”, O’Brien was perhaps best known as the host of TV Party – the public access show on which he interviewed guests, such as Debbie Harry and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

O’Brien’s show is indispensable for any student of New York’s punk/new wave/no wave underground scene as the candid chaos of TV Party’s improvised anarchy illuminates these people, this music and art in a way that no documentary ever will. Looking back on these episodes is a bit like watching a nature film where you have the opportunity to view wild things in their natural environment.

Here’s a massive playlist I made for y’all: This kicks off with a feature documentary about Glenn and TV Party before deep-diving into a handful of classic episodes and a few spotlit interviews. Keep your eyes peeled for Blondie, Chris Stein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Arto Lindsay, and David Byrne…

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.

I celebrated the 15th anniversary of 24 Hour Party People in a recent post. And over the weekend I discovered this great old BBC show called The Way They Were. On this episode you’ll find the real Tony Wilson presenting a selection of punk and new wave acts on his So It Goes television show from 1976 – 1978. Here’s the roster:

Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Iggy Pop, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Penetration, Blondie, Fall, Jam, Jordan, Devo, Tom Robinson Band, Johnny Thunder, Elvis Costello, XTC, Jonathan Richman, Nick Lowe, Siouxie & the Banshees, Cherry Vanilla & Magazine

This is on a VHS tape recording uploaded to YouTube. Have at it punks!

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

This is a pipe.

The influential French filmmaker died on Sunday (9/12) and we were sad to see one of the brighter lights of the New Wave go dark. He lived a long life – 80 years – and he leaves us with his beautiful images.

If Jean-Luc Godard appeals to critics because of his extreme interest in politics and film theory, if François Truffaut appeals to the popular audience because of his humanism and sentimentality, it is Claude Chabrol—film critic, filmmaker, philosopher—whose work consistently offers the opportunity for the most balanced appeal. His partisans find especially notable the subtle tone of Chabrol’s cinema: his films are apparently cold and objective portraits of profoundly psychological situations; and yet that coldness never approaches the kind of fashionable cynicism, say, of a Stanley Kubrick, but suggests, rather, something closer to the viewpoint of a god who, with compassion but without sentiment, observes the follies of his creations.

Chabrol’s work can perhaps best be seen as a cross between the unassuming and popular genre film and the pretentious and elitist art film: Chabrol’s films tend to be thrillers with an incredibly self-conscious, self-assured style—that is, pretentious melodrama, aware of its importance. For some, however, the hybrid character of Chabrol’s work is itself a problem: indeed, just as elitist critics sometimes find Chabrol’s subject matter beneath them, so too do popular audiences sometimes find Chabrol’s style and incredibly slow pace alienating.

—Charles Derry, Film Reference.com

In his honor we present Les Biches (1968). When an architect becomes involved with two, beautiful bi-sexual women, at tragedy ensues. This film is hosted by our YouTube Channel.

Enjoy and leave a comment!

Stay Awake!

Joe Nolan <3