Perfect Sound Forever: Alex Chilton tribute

Alex Chilton tribute by Jason Gross for Perfect Sound Forever: "Sitting at a bar with one of my editors a few years ago, we were discussing who our musical heroes were. His choice was Mike Watt (which is a good choice) and mine was Alex Chilton.

It wasn't just that the confused (post) adolescent fantasies he concocted on Big Star's Radio City spoke to me in a really personal way when I first heard it in high school, making me feel a little less afraid of that strange transitional period in my life.

It was also LX's whole attitude towards music and the biz. He'd been a Box Top with hits, a cult hero in Big Star and spent most of the rest of his life as a solo act, again in cult mode. He was immersed in the biz but never really concered with anything than playing and writing, even if it wasn't for a large audience. He just had to do it and if he put out weird, esoteric records that made sense only to a cult following, so be it. That was his statement and his life. I loved him for it.

I heard the news of his death a few days before I was hoping to see him perform with Big Star at SXSW. A lot of people there were crushed by the unexpected news. The fact that the rest of the band went on with the show with special guests filling in as a tribute was a lovely way to pay some respect to him.

PSF had ran a few articles about LX and Big Star that we wanted to highlight again, along with some further thoughts on about him from a blog posting I did soon after I heard the bad news.

Thank you Alex- no matter how many records you didn't manage to sell, you really were a big star."

• LX's solo years

• Interview with Big Star's Andy Hummel

• Interview with Big Star's Jody Stephens

• Thoughts on LX

No, not that Mickey Rooney!

{Modesto Bee/ May, 1958}

Men in Women-in-Prison movies

" ... In a scene right at the beginning of the film, socialite Terry Rich (Anitra Ford) walks into a nightclub in which Blossom (Pam Grier) is performing. Terry pauses in front of the stage with her (apparently wealthy and/or influential) boyfriend beside her. Blossom grins at the boyfriend (who stands there looking awkward) and then more emphatically at Terry, who, after a second, gives a half-amused, half-appreciative smile in return, and sways two or three times to the beat. ...


"The Big Bird Cage" (1972) Opening Scene
From: iwasateenageshutdown

... In other words, the power and the sexual charge in the scene comes from two women connecting with each other. This isn't all that unusual in male-oriented entertainment; there's lots of lesbian porn for guys, obviously. What is less familiar, though, is the insistence with which the scene deliberately excludes men — whether it be the boyfriend or, by extension, the male sexploitation viewer. Terry doesn't want to be Blossom; rather she is enjoying being with Blossom. In contrast, my investment in the scene is not just a lust for the protagonists, but a lust to be them; to gain access to a power and knowledge specifically inscribed in female relationships, which is unavailable to men, and thus all the more desired.
This dynamic — of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in, female relationships — was the defining feature of a handful of women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized — feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream. How this unlikely cathexis occurred, and how it functioned, is the subject of this essay. ..."
Noah Berlatsky, for Bright Lights Film Journal, is having a look at Men in Women-in-Prison.

Daphne Oram

" ... Oram was one of the first British composers to produce electronic sound, a pioneer of what became "musique concrete" – music made with sounds recorded on tape, the ancestor of today's electronic music. Her story makes for fascinating reading. She was born in 1925 when Britain was between two world wars. She was extremely bright, and studied music and electronics – unusual at the time not only because electronics was an exciting new industry, but also because it was a man's world. ..."
Daphne Oram: Portrait of an electronic music pioneer, article in Guardian by Robert Worby. (via Up-Tight)
boomp3.com
boomp3.com
Both tracks taken from the 2007 compilation Daphne Oram - Oramics.

Note: More info about Oram can be found at her Wikipedia-entry and at this lengthy article.

Does America Have Any Culture?

" ... Here's what happened: I'm teaching a class on twentieth-century popular culture at the University of Leipzig. I don't know why the school asked me to do this, but it did. And it turns out that any seminar on U. S. consumer culture is extremely attractive to every non-American kid majoring in American studies, because ninety-six students signed up for the class in the span of three days. Due to the size of the classroom, I was forced to immediately reduce this number to twenty. I was unsure how to do that fairly, so I decided to give them a competitive online essay test before the first day of class. The question was this: "Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American -- not necessarily the most historically important, but the individual you find most personally compelling?" The responses were well written, habitually understated, and devoid of any pattern whatsoever.
...
Since my arrival in Leipzig, I have continually been reminded about the way many Germans view American culture. They essentially feel it does not exist. One grad student only half jokingly told me that an entire semester of American cultural studies "should probably take about twenty-five minutes." But this, of course, is crazy. Now more than ever, I feel certain that the United States is as good at manufacturing culture as the rest of the world combined, probably because we often do so accidentally. A lack of culture is not our problem. The problem is we've become too effective at distributing that culture -- at the same time, in the same way, and with the same velocity. It all ends up feeling interchangeable, which makes it all marginally irrelevant. As it turns out, my initial question was beyond impossible. There are no interesting twentieth-century Americans. There can't be, because they all are."

Chuck Klosterman (for Esquire) goes to Germany to teach a class. His students teach him a lesson about how the world views us: Does America Have Any Culture? (via Unpop)

The fatal instincts of Gloria Grahame

" ... Once, when I was drunk in an attic in New Jersey, I flipped on the television, and there was Gloria Grahame in something called Naked Alibi (1954), lip-synching to a song and gyrating obscenely in a sleazy club, a taunting, creepy image that kept me from sleep and kept me watching as she played out another brutal film noir plot, raising her eyebrows and goading the men around her to violence, rough sex, and ruin. Most of Grahame's films have lurid titles: Blonde Fever (1944), Roughshod (1949), The Bad and the Beautiful, Sudden Fear (both 1952), The Good Die Young (1954), Blood and Lace (1970), and, my personal favorite, Mama's Dirty Girls (1974). Say her name out loud, and it even sounds like her: Gloria Grahame, fancy and earthy at once, tart, ungraspable. She generally makes her entrance on-screen accompanied by a wail of hot jazz, eating candy, applying lipstick to that puffy mouth, flipping her dirty hair and cheap hoop earrings, extending her toned legs so we can see her shapely feet tied up in ankle-strap high heels. Her perversity knows no limits on-screen; in life, she was capable of sleeping with the 13-year-old son of her second husband, Nicholas Ray (she later married this stepson and bore him sons). She could never deny her impulses, and her wantonness made and then destroyed an exciting career in movies. ...

... Gloria Grahame lived on the sidelines of her films because it was there that she could cause the most trouble; she might appear in any movie, young and sullen, aged and insistent, under a pound of make-up or plain-faced, fucking the pain away, putting out a cigarette in someone's eye, giggling for no reason. She's inescapable, a disruptive force, and when I hear her in my head, she seems to say, "C'mon, you know you want to . . ."
Dan Callahan tells us about the fatal instincts of Gloria Grahame for Bright Lights Film Journal.

A great clip with Gloria from Fritz Lang's The Big Heat:

Video clip added by Indigo1045

The Billy Letters

"In the late '90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy. ..."

Little Billy's original letter.


Manson's first response.

Little Billy’s letters to Richard Ramirez, Charles Manson, and other killer pals.
His correspondence with Larry Flynt, Alan Greenspan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
(All this featured today in Radar.)

Note: When not writing Charles Manson and Larry Flynt letters Bill Geerhart is one of the guys unveiling cold war and atomic-age culture over at Conelrad.

The Making of Blonde on Blonde

"A memory from the summer of 1966: Across the Top 40 airwaves, an insistent drum beat led off a strange, new hit song. Some listeners thought the song too explicit, its subject of wild lunacy too coarse, even cruel; several radio-station directors banned it. Despite the controversy over the lyrics about madness and persecution, or more likely because of it, the record shot to No. 3 on the Billboard pop-singles chart. The singer-songwriter likened the song, which really was a rap, to a sick joke. His name was Jerry Samuels, but he billed himself as Napoleon the XIV, performing “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”

That spring, an equally controversial single, with an eerily similar opening, had quickly hit No. 2; and by summer, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” had reappeared as the opening track on the mysterious double album, Blonde on Blonde, by Bob Dylan, who said the song was about “a minority of, you know, cripples and orientals and, uh, you know, and the world in which they live.” Over Coppertone-slicked bodies on Santa Monica Beach and out of secluded make-out spots and shopping-center parking lots and everywhere else American teenagers gathered that summer, it seemed that, the ba-de-de-bum-de-bum announcing Dylan’s hit about getting stoned was blaring from car radios and transistor radios, inevitably followed by the ba-de-de- bum-de-bum announcing Jerry Samuels’s hit about insanity. It would be Samuels’s last big recording; and after July, Dylan would be convalescing from a serious motorcycle crash. ..."

Mystic Nights - The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville. Article in Oxford American by Sean Wilentz. (via del.icio.us/runky.funky)

Where was Kerouac going?

"Jack Kerouac’s proposed design for the front cover of the paperback edition of On the Road (1952)."

"... And yet, if On the Road long ago ceased to be a revolutionary narrative, it did introduce a pair of legends that remain persistent—and, I’d argue, counterproductive—ideals. The first is that of spontaneous composition which Kerouac promoted throughout the ’50s, even banging out a short guide, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” ...

... Kerouac, however, had been trying to write On the Road for two and a half years before he started working on this version; he’d struggled through several drafts that lacked the necessary immediacy and voice. That’s one reason the book has so much power—it’s the expression of an artist wrestling with a problem, the problem of how to make language and experience explode off the page. ...

... Nonetheless, he understood that spontaneity is not always the best strategy, and when he worked on Buddhist-themed books like The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960), which he considered holy, he wrote “in pencil, carefully revised and everything, because it was a scripture. I had no right to be spontaneous. ...”

Fifty years after the publication of On the Road, the question remains: Where was Kerouac going?, article at bookforum.com. (via BoingBoing)

A Wonderful Life

"... On August 16th, 1977, Presley was found at his Graceland home around noon —unconscious and unresponsive — by fiancée Ginger Alden. According to never-confirmed rumors, Alden discovered Presley lying on the floor of his bathroom; all he would say later was that it was "a shameful scene." Rushed to Baptist Memorial Hospital by paramedics, Presley, apparently a victim of a prescription drug overdose, slipped into a coma, and fears were high that he might not survive. In a statement on the steps of the hospital, Presley's father, Vernon, announced to the world, "My boy may not make it." Presley himself later said he was "right next door to dead."
But the next day, Presley awoke and was discharged from the hospital three days later. He checked into Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota, a leading drug and alcohol abuse rehabilitation center, where he would stay for a month. ..."


Presley and Tina Turner perform "Proud Mary" at "Live Aid," on July 13, 1985. This was Presley's first public concert appearance since June 26, 1977, at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis.


In a part written specifically for him, Presley returned to the big screen as the title character in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. "Bill" was the first of Presley's roles to reference his martial-arts background. Presley hadn't starred in a film since 1969's Change of Habit.

Elvis Presley • 1935-2007 - A Wonderful Life, a life-after-death story at The MemphisFlyer Online (via Sonic)

The man who went too high

"The 13th Floor Elevators were the first psychedelic band. And their singer was one of the 60s' first acid casualties. Now Roky Erickson's back. ...

... In 2007, however, Barrett and Spence are dead, while Wilson and Erickson are on the road again. What's more, Erickson's voice is in fine fettle. On June 18, one month before he turns 60, he will play his first ever UK show at Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown festival. Erickson is only dimly aware of the man he calls "Jarvis Coker", but he is pleased to be coming to England for the first time since 1980. "We had interviews," he recalls. "And egg mayonnaise. Have you ever eaten egg mayonnaise? It's good, isn't it?" How does he feel to be performing after so long? "Real good," he says, beaming. "I'd taken a vacation and that was it. ..."

The man who went too high, article (and interview sort of) about the come back of Roky Erickson by Dorian Lynskey for Guardian. (via Outsider Music)

Bonus: A decent YouTube clip from the 2007 tour, Roky Erickson & The Explosives - "Your Gonna Miss Me"

Look At Yourselves!

My primary trepidation is that when I post here, other PCLers will think, "Oh, Christ, that again. Where has he been!?!? Under a rock?!?!" But screw that- I'm doin' it anyway.



A guilty pleasure of mine for some time now has been Vice Magazine's DOs and DON'Ts.

For some, evidence of the end times. But they're jerks. Look away, if you can...



Acerbic, hateful, funny, deserving, respectful, puerile, stupid and apt commentary that accompanies each photo is as much motivation to visit as the pictures.

Do women and horror movies mix?

"Do women and horror movies mix? Are women excited by being scared to death and watching the bodies pile up? ...

... Psychologists have long believed that our attraction to horror films is that they allow us to explore and experiment with fears and emotions, but there are suggestions that women respond to fear in a way that men don't. "Fear can facilitate sexual responsiveness in women, whereas it inhibits it in men," says Dr Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at King's College London. Isn't that a little close to the myth that women have rape fantasies? "No," he says. "It has to be in a safe, controlled environment, so watching a horror film is a good example. I'm not saying this is the only reason for watching. Horror films, for men and women, are about learning to cope with emotions that would threaten to overwhelm us if they happened in reality." I ask Sarah if The Hills Have Eyes 2 turned her on. She laughs. "No, it was a mixture of boredom and feeling a bit sick. Which isn't sexy." ...

... What I hear again and again is that there just aren't enough female directors in any genre, but especially in horror. One effort to change this has come from the low-budget film studio Warp X, which is running Darklight, an initiative to encourage female horror directors. Ten were chosen and they have been taking part in workshops; at least two of the films to come out of it will be made. "We are focusing on horror because the genre is becoming more popular," says Caroline Cooper Charles, head of creative development. "Horror is a very well-trodden genre with clear tropes and it could do with an injection of something different, something new to make it more exciting. The idea of bringing a female perspective, to see whether those women will come up with anything different, was really interesting." ... "

'Everything but the ghoul', article in Guardian Unlimited Film Features. (via del.icio.us/thgroh)