Delving into the Dangerous Minds archives, we’re revisiting a submission Lydia Lunch sent to us regarding the Post Catastrophe Collaborative Workshop that she curated in Ojai, California, in 2013.
In 1974, somewhere between a divination and a voicemail left too late, Nico recorded one of the strangest, coldest, and most quietly devastating songs ever aimed at a dead lover.
She didn’t name him, didn’t raise her voice, didn’t cry. But everyone knew who it was for. The track was called ‘You Forget to Answer’ – as blunt and cruel as a dial tone – and it was her way of talking to Jim Morrison from the other side.
“I thought of Jim Morrison as my brother. So we would grow together. We still do because he is my soul brother. We exchanged blood. I carry his blood inside me.”
Nico
Hidden in plain sight in the midst of his prodigious creative output, there is an unfairly overlooked gem in David Byrne’s discography that I feel is an absolutely monumental masterpiece of late 20th-century music, one right up there with Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and his seminal collaboration with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
I refer, of course, to the seamless funk opera score Byrne created for choreographer Twyla Tharp in 1981, The Catherine Wheel. Unless you were a big Talking Heads fan or are a David Byrne completist, chances are this one might have passed you by.
By 1981, David Byrne was already halfway to becoming the twitchy prophet of American art-funk, but The Catherine Wheel is where things got… weirdly pure. You had Reagan just slithering into office, the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over every teenager’s head like a low-budget John Carpenter plot, and here’s Byrne, sweating out manic percussion patterns with a cadre of cosmic funk wizards and experimental savants in a ballet score for Twyla Tharp.
Nick Cave ‘SCUM’ songs of bile and retribution - DANGEROUS MINDS
William S Burroughs and The Beatles - DANGEROUS MINDS
Oh you thought it was Lennon who was so interested in art and experimentation?
Nope it was Macca who commissioned Peter Blake and Jann Howarth (Sgt Pepper) and cultivated the relationship with Richard Hamilton (the White Album) and also it was Bill Burroughs hanging out with Paul when making cut ups and the formation even of Eleanor Rigby
Ray says”
Sure, you’ve seen William S Burroughs’ face peering out from the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, sandwiched somewhere between Carl Jung and Aleister Crowley. But it turns out the old man of the cut-up method wasn’t just a symbolic figure in the Beatles’ universe—he was physically there. In the room. Right in the thick of it, while Paul McCartney was hammering out the now-immortal ‘Eleanor Rigby’."
Another fascinating article from Ray Metzger at Dangerous Minds
Uncle Lou slags off the Beatles and The Doors
Just an hysterically brilliant reed (er, sorry read!)
Just a note that Dangerous Minds, one of my very favourite blogs, IS back up and running although posts resume with the last one on body artist ROLAND LOOMIS
Last article from DANGEROUS MINDS - FAKIR!
Dangerous Minds is a loose collective of about 18 writers; I most often posts articles by Richard Metzger, Jason Louv and others who share very specific and eclectic tastes and interests always worth a visit
the archives start at Sept 2009 so its been around for nearly as long as the blog nobody reads!
here . . . .
Does anybody have any insight as to where Dangerous Minds has gone? The link goes straight to a generic Nexcess page (sic) and all the archive is unavailable . . . .I have written to him via Facebook but not heard anything back as yet
Now I adored Dangerous Minds and frequently (tho’ maybe not frequently enough - ED) shared the amazing breadth of articles from pieces on Body art to musical review and articles all with a particular radical bent. So this is has happened before I think and he returned but there is no indication either way.
We are all the poorer for his absence but I have asked if he intends to return and will post here if and when he might reply - noting it is that season of the year from about Easter on when bloggers seem to take a holiday or early Spring break so fingers crossed . . . . . Art From the Future being a case in post when we haven’t noticed any new images for an age (not over a month)
Scene: Lower Quinton in South Warwickshire, England. Population 493. A quiet village, settled in its ways, where everyone knows each other and strangers are not welcome—or so it seems.
On the morning of Saint Valentine’s Day 1945, Charles Walton a seventy-four-year-old farm laborer left his home at Lower Quinton to begin his day’s work. Walton was employed by Alfred Potter at Firs Farm. He was tasked with cutting down hedges at a field on the slope of Meon Hill. It was a cold morning. Mist slowly dispersed as the sun warmed the land. There had been a bad harvest in the previous year, it was hoped this summer would bring a better yield.
Potter later claimed he saw Walton working in his short sleeves at around lunchtime. He said Walton had an hour’s worth of hedge still to trim. He watched as Walton hacked away at the branches with his trouncing hook.
When Walton’s adopted niece Edith Walton returned from her work that night, she was surprised to find her uncle not yet home. Edith knew Walton did not like working late as he suffered from arthritis. She decided to go and look for her uncle. She enlisted the help of a neighbor, Harry Beasley, and the farmer Alfred Potter.
Climbing up Meon Hill, the three discovered Walton’s body. He had been brutally murdered. His trouncing hook was embedded in his neck. His blood soaked the ground. A pitchfork had been thrust through his head, puncturing eye and cheek. His trousers were undone. His shirt and jacket open. A large cross had been carved on his chest. It was later said natterjack toads were placed around his body. Walton’s death looked like a ritual sacrifice.
Charles Walton was a quiet man. He was feared by some and considered odd by others. It was said he could cast an evil eye which could blight crops and kill cattle. They said he could also talk to animals, tame wild dogs, and call birds from the sky into his hand. This led to the whispered accusation Walton was a witch.
Walton’s murder attracted the attention of the London press. The countryside was a remote, foreign land to those denizens of the city, who tended to view country folk as backward, filled with superstition, strange individuals who practiced pagan rituals and witchcraft.
The local constabulary were baffled by Walton’s murder. Scotland Yard was approached for assistance. On February 16th, Chief Inspector Robert Fabian, the Yard’s most successful detective, was dispatched to solve the crime.
Fabian decided to interview all of the inhabitants of Lower Quinton. However, he found the local residents taciturn and unwilling to cooperate with his investigation. He also discovered the only other murder to have previously taken place in the village had been in 1875 when a young woman Ann Tennant was similarly slaughtered with a pitchfork by a farm laborer James Heywood. Heywood claimed he had killed Tennant because she was a witch who had cast spells against him.
The ritualistic nature of Walton’s murder intrigued academic and Egyptolgist Margaret Murray. She traveled to the village to make her own inquiries. Murray was an expert on the occult and believed Walton’s death was a blood sacrifice carried out by a coven of witches.
Fabian believed he knew the perpetrator of Walton’s murder, but he had insufficient evidence to make an arrest. He returned to London. Walton’s murder remains unsolved to this day.
In 1970, Fabian wrote about Charles Walton’s murder in his memoir The Anatomy of Crime:
"I advise anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and to think of his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite."So begins Rupert Russell‘s excellent documentary film The Last Sacrifice, which examines the events surrounding Charles Walton’s death. The film explains how this bloody murder in 1945 unleashed a new genre called folk horror leading to a slate of films like Plague of the Zombies, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and most famously The Wicker Man.
By Paul Gallagher
Now this is one of my favourite subjects from the always brilliant Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds
Richard says : "Sorry, but this is not going to be one of those analog vs. digital rants that goofball audiophile types like to indulge in at the drop of a hat. In fact I probably should have just called it something like “Why you should never buy new vinyl versions of classic albums.”
Actually I like digital audio just fine. In fact, until four years ago, I’d have told you that I preferred it. SACDs, HDCDs, High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Rays, 24-bit HD master audio files, 5.1 surround sound, DSD files—I have a large amount of this kind of material, both on physical media and with another ten terabytes on a computer drive. I like streaming audio very much. Roon is the bomb! Let me be clear, I’ve got no problem with digital audio. Even if I did, 99.9% of all music made these days is produced on a computer, so there’s really no practical way to avoid it. Analog and digital audio are two very separate things and each has its own pluses and minuses. I like them both for different reasons.
Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost none of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you.
Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail". . . . . . .continues here
extreme vinyl collecting . . . .
HALLOWEEN JACK WAS A REAL COOL CAT: NEW BOWIE BOOKS FOR THE HOLIDAZE
This is a guest post by Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Zoning and Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg.
Doubtless, there are naysayers who may wonder whether the world needs yet another book dedicated to David Bowie, a man whose many lives and multifaceted career have been exhaustively, though not always accurately, scrutinised over the past six decades. The Bowie shelf in the Rock and Pop Hall of Records is as prodigious as any, and it’s tricky to find a new angle on an artist who was a genre unto himself or discover any unexplored territory that hasn’t already been charted.
This is well worth a read as ever over at Dangerous Minds and a guest writer thanks as ever to
Richard Metzger
You can order David Bowie and Cracked Actor: The Fly in The Milk from Red Planet Books here.
You can order a copy of David Bowie Rainbowman: 1967-1980 here.
"Six years before Alejandro Jodorowsky’s extraordinary but ill-fated 1975 attempt to film Frank Herbert’s Dune—the story of which was compellingly told in the recent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune—there was another similarly ambitious and ground-breaking film project that, until recently, was largely unknown.
Saturation 70 was a special effects-laden science fiction movie starring Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and Julian Jones, the five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Unlike Dune, Saturation 70 did actually make it into production and was shot, but never completed, then was forgotten and undocumented for over forty years.” read on . . . . .
