A nice series from Paul over at ALBUMS THAT SHOULD EXIST on the Fund Raiser from the Earthquake Relief Benefit, held in the San Francisco Bay Area in late 1989 These concerts were a reaction to the Loma Prieta earthquake, which happened on October 16, 1989.
I don’t know my Eminem well enough to find this anything other than amazing . . . what a gal!
I know I get late to the party usually and this is no exception being from Sex Education on Netflix current binge here is Kate Stables and This is The Kit “Bashed Out"
This Is The Kit: "Bashed Out"
11 years ago they said , well the director of the vid Sam Weller and Kate did: "Hello! If you discovered this song on 'Sex Education' 'Pretty Little Liars' or 'Grace + Frankie' may we suggest listening to the full album http://smarturl.it/bashedoutor one of these playlists https://orcd.co/introducingtitkDirected by Sam Weller. Here's what he had to say about it:"I felt close to Kate's lyrics almost at once. Images started to appear to me: A room in a river. A man falling into water. The film El Topo. The wind blowing leaves. Kate told me that an inspiration had been Rudyard Kipling's The Crab that Played with the Sea."We built the room on a slipway in a morning with the tide coming in at the River Deben. The river has a powerful feeling of time and memory for me. We shot with the water coming into the room and as Ed Hirst got wetter and colder I felt it pushed his performance to a sort of limit. I wanted a crushed feeling. I knew his on screen presence would be very honest and kind of dark. He felt very right for the part. I think the song reaches into our pasts; how we are exposed to life."The shots of the band on the beach at dawn seemed a perfect counterpart. We rushed to get set up with the light changing second to second. We lit Kate, Rozi & Jamie with a massive PanAura light. It has a slightly ethereal quality. Very soft. We shot in RAW so we couldn’t see any footage, really nerve wracking. It was a very special day. A lot of people helping for nothing. It brought us all together I think. That night we sat around Ben’s bonfire talking for ages."Kate Stables frontperson for the band had this to say:"Sam is a great friend and excellent film maker. Everything he does (be it Chinese medicine, healing, film making, cooking or building houses) he totally does with complete dedication and professionalism. Plus he's just a total pleasure to be around and work with. The last shot with me, Rozi and Jamie going under water (a nod to a scene from El Topo) was extremely cold. We could only manage about three takes before our heads started to fall off."They built an actual room out side on the estuary so that it would fill up with the tide. Ed (the actor) was brilliant and a real trooper. I can't remember how many times he had to fall into the night time freezing water but it was definitely more times than anyone deserves."I'm an avid listener of stories on cassette and one of my favourites is the Just So stories read by Johnny Morris. Making this video we were thinking about the story of Pau Amma the Crab. In the times of the oldest magician when the world was so new and all, Pau Amma the giant king crab crept off and did not play the part he was supposed to play.... We all need to be a bit quieter sometimes. Looking and listening more. Less talking and telling."
Troubled her entire life by her complex mental health (she lived in a Mental Hospital for the last twenty something years of her life) she still managed to creat a massive following amongst the public who seems to take her to their hearts wherever her work appeared
With the passing of Yayoi Kusama, the art world finds itself several shades darker than it was yesterday.
Kusama seemed like an easy enough figure to understand on the surface. She was polkadots and neon colours, the family-friendly face of conceptual art who brought joy to a joyless world. However, the reality of the Matsumoto native is one a lot more complex.yous, and lots of it is the kind that a more cerebral kind of new family will show their kids as a way of introducing them to art in a way that can be genuinely understood and felt by a child. However, that’s not to say that the woman herself was childlike at all.
For one thing, Kusama spoke openly about how her art came from a place of pain. She was plagued by mental health difficulties for her entire life. Thus, Kusama’s bright, colourful art came not from her reflecting her mental state, but rather creating the work she needed to see to keep going. For another, Kusama wasn’t someone who created joyous work for the sake of spreading simple joy.
Especially in her late 1960s heyday, Kusama spread joy as a form of activism, hitting back against a world that, much like it does today, felt like it was coming to an end back then too.
After making a name for herself in the same conceptual art circles that Yoko Ono was frequenting earlier in the decade, the late 1960s saw Kusama expand her reach with a set of works that she called ‘Happenings’.
These were performance art pieces that saw her draw attention to the evils of the world via a series of attention-grabbing and ludicrous stunts. Some of these saw Kusama herself take centre stage, like the time she wrote an open letter to then-president Richard Nixon offering to have sex with him in exchange for ending the Vietnam War.
However, for a number of these happenings, Kusama needed backup. Lots of it. After all, these involved stunts like disrupting the New York Stock Exchange with a large number of dancing people clad only in polka dots painted on their bodies. For these, Kusama needed support, and she found it in the form of the Kusama Dancing Team, a group of young gay men who were happy to take part in these happenings. Both as a way of rebelling against the system and finding a foothold in the world of conceptual art.
They would also get bed and board out of it to a certain degree. As the 1960s became the 1970s, she offered out her studio to the Kusama Dancing Team as a place to live. Since this was an era of free love and the Dancing Team consisted entirely of very attractive gay men, they would also regularly engage in group sex with each other. Kusama adapted this into a form of art as well, inviting news crews to film her studio just as these orgies would begin. Why do you think she called this studio the Kusama Omophile Kompany, or KOK for short.
Again, it would be easy to write this off as hippy-dippy, peace and love nonsense. However, beneath the polka dots and the ludicrous stunts was a burning social conscience. Yes, she got a bunch of her friends to dance outside the New York Stock Exchange, but she also promoted these happenings with fliers that said, “STOCK IS A FRAUD! STOCK MEANS NOTHING TO THE WORKING MAN! STOCK IS A LOT OF CAPITALIST BULLSHIT!”
These weren’t excuses to see a bunch of cute twinks in the buff, after all, Kusama was famously asexual. These were acts of anti-capitalist art. Hell, these were acts of praxis.
So yes, the world is a duller, less magical place without Yayoi Kusama in it. Partially because it’s got fewer polka dots in it, but also because it has lost a powerful, brave voice that never stopped fighting against systems of oppression.
Just because that was a fight fought with polka dots and butts doesn’t mean it was any less fought.
Julian Cope - Me Singing (1984)
From Julian Cope’s 2nd solo LP Fried. His first LP is my fave but there are some great songs on Fried. The LP cover got a lot of attention.
I try my hand at work
Oh work seems to be for an earlier person
Das Lied von Einsamen Mädchen
Nico
