By Furiodetti – Furio Detti, CC BY 3.0, Link

Filmmaker, poet, critic and philosopher Jonas Mekas passed away on January 23 at the age of 96. The wildly creative and willfully cantankerous Mekas was a champion of experimental cinema and a film critic whose taste and style was ahead of its time. Mekas is credited with getting Andy Warhol to try his hand at movie-making, and his feminist defense of Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird put the nearly-century old Mekas right in time with millenials and the Me Too movement. Mekas was a well known Lithuanian language poet, and a collaborator with Nico, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Salvador Dali. However he’s best remembered as a film curator and critic. Here’s the Wiki…

In 1954, together with his brother Adolfas Mekas, he founded Film Culture, and in 1958 he began writing his “Movie Journal” column for The Village Voice. In 1962, he co-founded Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Along with Lionel Rogosin, he was part of the New American Cinema movement.

Days after his passing The Guardian published Mekas’ last interview. Here’s a taste of Mekas’ famous flair for creative camaraderie…

Perhaps most importantly, he opened up his loft to friends and fellow travellers in the avant garde. Here, any number of legendary – or soon to be legendary – artists met to watch endless films in which nothing happened, while discussing cultural possibilities. These included Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Salvador Dalí, Kenneth Anger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs. (Although he was firmly rooted in the counterculture, he had many establishment friends. Mekas taught the children of John and Jackie Kennedy to make films.)

It was at Mekas’s apartment that Warhol first became interested in film-making. “In my loft,” he says, “Andy met film-makers and was inspired by them. That’s where he got the bug. My loft was a gathering space for musicians, poets, film-makers.” Mekas helped Warhol shoot Empire, an eight-hour, slow-motion film of an unchanging view of the Empire State Building. He has little time for those who regard Warhol as merely a self-publicist. He didn’t seek out fame, says Mekas – it was the other way round.

“The newspapers began to attack him and it created a kind of fame. Then the society around him began to seek him out. Then everybody began to write and say, ‘Andy is only interested in those fake people, he only wants fame.’ But it was the reverse . He was never interested in them and, the more he ignored them, the more they flocked to him. Everybody could go into the Factory – and lost souls would come in because he never said no. Whatever they said, he acted like a good father. He just never said no.”

Read the rest of the interview here, and watch this great vid about Mekas, his life and work to find out more about the great man…

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Back in the late 1990s one of the most impressive sites in Nashville’s art scene was the Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel. The kiddie ride was designed by Nashville artist Red Grooms and it featured whimsical and even grotesque chimeras like Captain Tom Ryman fused with his own steamboat or H.G. Hill monstrously combined with one of the shopping carts from his eponymous chain of grocery stores. The carousel celebrated notable and heroic Tennesseans and it was a hit with little kids whose ride donations funded the upkeep of the beautifully bizarre contraption at its home on Nashville’s riverfront. But after Opry Mills mall stopped its water taxi service to downtown Nashville the ride became neglected, and it’s been in storage since the state museum took ownership of the Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel Foundation — and its debt — in 2003.

Of course the Tennessee State Museum is getting a brand new home, and the carousel could get a new life in its own dedicated building near the new museum. However, that’s going to take a lot of money. Catch up on the story of the carousel with this great radio report from WPLN Nashville Public Radio. And join Nashville artists and art lovers for the Free the Carousel Art March this Sunday afternoon in downtown Nashville…

Red Grooms was a pop artist who moved to Manhattan in the late 1950s, and collaborated and exhibited with pals like Alex Katz, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenberg. Fellow Nashville artist Myles Maillie is the organizer behind the march. Check out the official site for more information.

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I once read an essay by music critic Simon Reynolds where he pointed out that the fundamental difference between punk music and the new wave and no wave music that followed it is that new wave and no wave bands were formed by art school kids, but punk music was always rooted in literary inspirations — Patti Smith was a poet before she was a rocker, and Tom Verlaine took his pseudonym directly from another verse-slinger.

Now there’s a new book about the influence the New York Poets of the 1960′s had on the punk kids. Here’s PBS with the word…

“Patti Smith, Richard Hell, these people we know as musicians came to New York to be poets,” said Kane. “And they came with relatively old-fashioned notions about what constitutes poetry. These poets gave them alternative ways of thinking about poetry.”

In many ways, Kane shows, these musicians had a love-hate relationship with the New York School poets because of those differences. While these poets were insistent on not taking poetry too seriously (poet Ed Sanders, for example, published a magazine at the time called “F*** You: a magazine of the arts”), these musicians had come to New York with the closely-held ideas that an artist was meant to convey high emotion and speak from a position of authority — ideas taken from earlier poets like the British romantics, and reiterated by beat poets like Allen Ginsberg.

“[New York School poet] Ted Berrigan would say, ‘poetry can be fun, it can be light-hearted,’” said Kane. “He questioned the authority people were investing in figures like Ginsberg. And meanwhile Lou Reed and Patti Smith were enamored of the arguably hyberbolic lyrics of a poem like [Ginsberg’s] ‘Howl.’”

But while musicians like Smith were in some ways resistant to the poets of the day, Kane shows how they were also influenced by them, including by the air of indifference they projected, and even their silliness.

On Smith’s 1975 album “Horses,” for example, she allowed herself to be funny, something she mostly set aside in her later music. “I think that deep, intelligent, rich humor was inspired partly by the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church,” Kane said. St. Marks is also the place Smith first performed.

Here’s Smith and her band live on Swedish television in 1976…

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Trying to sneak in a few more birthday notices before the year’s up, 2016 marks the 40th birthday of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It’s also the 30th birthday of John Cale’s third album which borrowed its title from Robbins’ novel. Cale’s Cowgirls is a live record/time capsule that captures the New York punk scene one decade later…

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the third live album by Welsh musician John Cale. It was originally released on LP in 1986 and then later reissued on cassette in 1987 with a different cover and drastically altered track listing. In 1991 it was reissued on CD with a third cover design, but with contents identical to the cassette edition. It was recorded in CBGB club in New York between 1978 and 1979 with three former members of Patti Smith Group, bassist Ivan Kral, keyboardist Bruce Brody and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. The LP version contains different track listing than CD.

Here’s a sampler of the album followed by a monster Cale playlist on YouTube…

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I dedicated one recent Halloween post to the all too real ghost of Lou Reed who died three years ago this past October, 27.

I’ve had a productive week this week: I handed in a final proposal for a community arts grant; I turned in a feature story about the challenges of being homeless in the winter time; I cranked-out a review of a new painting exhibition in Nashville; I started it all off with my first gig at the new Radio Cafe last Friday night. One of my favorite breaks during so much word mashing has been reading Flipboard where I found this Rolling Stone rundown of must-hear Lou Reed records just the other day…

I actually kind of hate the article — its far too reverent for any look at Lou. That said I love some of the selections on this rundown…

Loaded (1970)
Reed disbanded the Velvets before this release, but the swan-song fourth LP featured some of his most refined songwriting, especially the classics “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll.” “New Age” is a slept-on highlight of Reed’s ballad catalog. And “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” blueprints the spirit of Seventies rock from the wreckage of the Sixties.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal (1974)
The live set where “Lou Reed” the character – a gender-blurring, hypodermic-wielding rock & roll id monster – took center stage. Reshaping Velvet Underground classics for a new generation, this also stands as a high point in Seventies guitar rock, epitomized by an epically jammed-out “Sweet Jane.”

Coney Island Baby (1976)
Metal Machine Music’s follow-up was a deliciously tune-driven love letter to doo-wop, Brooklyn, a fictional football coach and a factual trans lover named Rachel. Still underappreciated, it’s ripe for rediscovery.

New York (1989)
Shaken by the AIDS crisis, Reed wrote a set of uncharacteristically political songs rooted in storytelling detail. Robert Quine is gone, replaced by Mike Rathke’s leaner sound, giving Reed more room to serve up vignettes like the inner-city love story “Romeo Had Juliette” and “Halloween Parade,” a doo-wop-steeped, “Walk on the Wild Side”–like requiem for departed friends.

“The Bells,” The Bells (1979) 

Reed enlists trumpeter Don Cherry on this nine-minute spiritual-jazz elegy for a man standing on a ledge, which at the time Reed surely was.

“I Love You, Suzanne,” New Sensations (1984)
Reed retools his sound for the Eighties, with clipped funk-rock underpinning and a touch of the Shangri-Las. A shoulda-been hit.

“Sword of Damocles – Externally,” Magic and Loss (1992)

An elegiac folk rocker about cancer and radiation therapy from an LP that stares mortality squarely in the eye. Chilling and redemptive.

I’ve added this video to past posts, but it never gets dull. Is this the best music video of all time?

And by the way, Rolling Stone, Lou Reed wasn’t a “storyteller.” Lou Reed was a songwriter who showed us how to bring the novel to melody in the same way that Bob Dylan brought poetry to song. Leonard Cohen brought song to poetry, but we already knew that.

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Three years ago I reviewed Steve Schapiro’s book of Taxi Driver photographs. Here are some of those words…

Of all the brilliant gems of 1970′s America’s New Hollywood Cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver may be the grimiest and goriest. Beyond Paul Schrader’s loneliness-crazed script or Scorsese’s street-level shooting, it’s Robert DeNiro’s portrait of the mohawked, gun-wielding avenger Travis Bickle that continues to make this film crackle with energy and danger decades later.

Steve Schapiro was the special photographer on the film’s set and his black-and-white and color snaps captured the making of the film both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Schapiro shot the then-dangerous setting of Times Square at night in lurid spectra that captured everything from the shining black of the rain-slicked streets to the painted cheeks of the prostitutes to the blazing white glow of the porno theater marquees to the orange/red orgy of bloody violence at the film’s climax. His black-and-white stills are the perfect comment on a character like Bickle who can see only dichotomous extremes from his self-inflicted isolation: saints and sinners, beauty and ugliness, the fallen and the redeemed.

This year we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Taxi Driver. Here’s a documentary that gives viewers a street level perspective at the making of this unlikely American classic…

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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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Following up on my last Patti Smith post, I realized the other night that 2015 is the 40th anniversary of Smith’s debut classic, Horses. I’ve seen lots of notices in the news this year about the 40th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run which also came out in 1975, but I don’t think I’ve heard a word about Horses.

Of course, Smith doesn’t make a commercial breakthrough until her third album, Easter, which features “Because the Night” which the singer co-wrote with Springsteen. They’re both from New Jersey, after all. Nonetheless, in 1975 Horses was a cannon blast of a kind of poetic rock not heard since the best days of The Doors along with one of Smith’s heroes, Jim Morrison. Smith covers Morrison covering Them with the album’s opener, “Gloria.” Add the sublime “Redondo Beach” and the homoerotic poetics of “Horses” and you’ve got a debut album lots of folks will remember four decades on.

Here’s a bit from a Rolling Stone interview with Smith. Check out all the odd coincidences surrounding the release of the record and the life of another Smith hero, French poet Arthur Rimbaud…

“The exact date is November 10th, and I want to celebrate it in New York in a special way,” Smith tells Rolling Stone. “We have things we’ll be doing in Paris and London, everywhere, because it’s a true milestone. I’m proud to have a milestone like that.”

The significance of putting the album out on November 10th is something that still makes Smith laugh. Originally, she had planned to put Horses out on October 20th, what would have been 19th century French poet – and major Patti Smith inspiration – Arthur Rimbaud’s 121st birthday.

“Something happened because of the gas shortage – they didn’t have enough vinyl – and it was postponed and I was really upset,” she recalls. “Then [Arista Records founder] Clive Davis told me, ‘Really sorry, it’s going to be November 10th. There’s nothing we can do that.’ And I just laughed and said, ‘Well, that’s the anniversary of Rimbaud’s death.’ It was still magical.”

The singer says she’s looking forward to commemorating the record, which contained the single “Gloria” and many songs that have become concert staples like “Redondo Beach” and “Free Money.” “I think we continue to deliver all of these songs sometimes stronger than when I was young,” the 67-year-old says. “So I’m going to be happy to celebrate it, to perform the album with happiness, not with any kind of cynicism or a cashing-in thing. It will be a true, proud celebration, so the answer is yes.”

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Experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs will be coming to Nashville from her New York home next week to screen a selection of experimental films from her 30 years in cinema. Originally from Memphis, one of Sachs’s earliest movies was a music video of a kind that she made for her pal, Memphis musician Randy Brand. The Randy Brand Film is a charming short featuring a fun melody and live footage of the band. The editing and experimental marking of the actual film all point to Sach’s work to come. The Light and Sound Machine will present Yes/No: The Cinema of Lynne Sachs on Thursday, September 17 at 8 P.M. in the Blue Room at Third Man Records. Sachs will be presenting a selection of films from her 30 year career followed by a Q&A event.

In the meantime, here’s The Randy Brand Film which is not on the schedule for next Thursday night. You’re welcome…

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I first heard about Nina Simone while reading Sam Shepard biographies which always mention his working as a busboy at the Village Gate, refilling the diva’s ice water glass during her performances in New York in the 1960′s. It was only years later that I fell under her spell and I still think her take on Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” might actually be the definitive version of what many consider to be his signature song.

Nina was an idiosyncratic piano player and an even more bizarre performer who voiced sexual passion and personal outrage with an often stone-faced countenance that resulted in multi-leveled, nuanced performances that were uniquely her own.

While fans of Simone anxiously await the release of the new documentary about the singer which will be released through Netflix this summer, here is a French production from 1992 that tells the singer’s tale as well as it’s recently been told. Here’s the IMDB…

In this up-close and personal portrait of vocalist and musician Nina Simone, the singer herself and a number of friends, relatives and connaisseurs tell excerpts of her path in music and life. Remarkably, the documentary was able to follow Simone on a visit back to her childhood home, and her mother and siblings are interviewed. Simone also discusses her participation in the civil rights movement and voices opinions that would be controversial then and now. Ultimately, this is a strong portrayal of the pain that was Nina Simone’s. Written by Peter Brandt Nielsen

Ladies and gentelmen, Nina Simone: The Legend…

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