Philippine “Pina” Bausch (July 27, 1940 – June 30, 2009) was a German-born modern dance choreographer, best-known for her piece Café Müller (1978).
Modern dance is a dance form developed in the early 20th century with its golden age in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the term Modern dances has also been applied to a category of 20th century ballroom dances, Modern dance as a term usually refers to 20th century concert dance. Generally mentioned in this category are Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.
HUNDREDS OF YOUNG MEN WENT ON A RAMPAGE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, shortly after 3 A.M. yesterday after a force of plain-clothes men raided a bar that the police said was well known for its homo-sexual clientele.
Thirteen persons were arrested and four policemen injured. The young men threw bricks, bottles, garbage, pennies and a parking meter at the policemen, who had a search warrant authorizing them in investigate reports that liquor was sold illegally at the bar, the Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square.–New York Times, June 29, 1969[2]
The Stonewall riots were a series of violent conflicts between New York Citypolice officers and groups of gay and transgender people that began during the early morning of June 28, 1969, and lasted several days. Also called the Stonewall Rebellion or simply Stonewall, the clash was a watershed for the worldwide gay rights movement, as gay and transgender people had never before acted together in such large numbers to forcibly resist police.
Except for Illinois, which decriminalizedsodomy in 1961, homosexual acts, even between consenting adults acting in private homes, were a criminal offense in every U.S. state at the time the Stonewall Riots occurred: “An adult convicted of the crime of having sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of his or her home could get anywhere from a light fine to five, ten, or twenty years—or even life—in prison. In 1971, twenty states had ‘sex psychopath‘ laws that permitted the detaining of homosexuals for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania and California sex offenders could be locked in a mental institution for life, and [in] seven states they could be castrated.” (Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, by David Carter, p. 15) Castration, emetics, hypnosis, electroshock therapy and lobotomies were used by psychiatrists to attempt to cure homosexuals through the 1950s and 1960s.(Katz, pp. 181–197.)(Adam, p. 60.)
Subsequent nightclubs, such as The Sanctuary, often billed as the first modern DJ-led nightclub of New York, epitomized the post-Stonewall era, “when gay men had won the right to dance intimately together without worrying about the police.” —Peter Braunstein
RIP Sky Saxon, 63, American, a minor rock musician known of his work with The Seeds has vanished from the firmament of 20th century music. Saxon enjoyed his floruit in the 1960s, his success was limited to North America.
Sky “Sunlight” Saxon (1946 – June 25, 2009) was best known as the leader and singer of the 1960s Los Angeles garage rock band The Seeds, and his hit single “(You’re) Pushin’ Too Hard” (1965).
The Seeds‘ raw and abrasive energy and simple, repetitive lyrics came to exemplify the garage rock style of the 1960s. Other notable recordings include “Mr Farmer” (1967), “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” and “Two Fingers Pointing on You,” which was included in Psych-Out, directed by Richard Rush in 1968.
“Pushin’ Too Hard“, released in 1965 as a single, is a musical composition by The Seeds, dealing with teenage angst about an unfaithful girl. “Lying girls” was a common theme of garage rock compositions.
Garage rock is a raw form of rock and roll that was first popular in the United States and Canada from about 1963 to 1967. During the 1960s, it was not recognized as a separate music genre and had no specific name. In the early 1970s, some rock critics retroactively labelled it as punk rock. However, the music style was later referred to as garage rock or ‘60s Punk to avoid confusion with the music of late-1970s punk rock bands such as the Sex Pistols and The Clash. The garage rock revival can be traced to the early 1970s, following the release of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 in 1972.
I’ve mentioned Michael Jackson twice[1][2] on this blog, once when I was amazed by his choice of footage in “They Don’t Care About Us“[3], and once when I did the obituary of James Brown when I mentioned that Brown’s “rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson”.
With more than 100 million albums sold, Thriller (1982) is the bestselling album of all time and is iconic in the history of 20th century popular music, where he is the natural heir to Elvis Presley. Beyond both dying from an abuse of prescription drugs, parallels beween Presley and Jackson are numerous (Graceland/Neverland). Lisa Marie Presley, for a short time married to Jackson in the nineties wrote at the time of Jackson’s death that he knew “exactly how his fate would be played out” and feared his death would echo that of Elvis Presley.
Farrah Fawcett (February 2, 1947 – June 25, 2009) was an American actress and sex symbol. Fawcett rose to international fame when she first appeared in Charlie’s Angels in 1976. In that year, a poster of her in a one-piece red bathing suit, was a best-seller and became an iconic picture of the 20th century. I quite liked her in The Burning Bed.
The Cut-Ups[1] is an experimental film by British filmmaker Antony Balch and American writer William Burroughs, which opened in London in 1967. It was the second time Balch and Burroughs had collaborated after their earlier Towers Open Fire. The Cut-Ups was part of an abandoned project called Guerrilla Conditions meant as a documentary on Burroughs and filmed throughout 1961-1965.
The film contains 19 minutes of someone saying “Yes, Hello?”, “Look at that picture,” “Does it seem to be persisting?,” and “Good. Thank you,” accompanied by a repetition five or six basic film clips shot in New York City and featuring Brion Gysin.
Inspired by Burroughs’ and Gysin’s technique of cutting up text and rearranging it in random order, Balch had an editor cut his footage for the documentary into little pieces and impose no control over its reassembly. The film opened at Oxford Street’s Cinephone cinema and had a disturbing reaction. Many audience members claimed the film made them ill, others demanded their money back, while some just stumbled out of the cinema ranting “its disgusting”.
Included in The Cut-Ups are shots of Burroughs acting out scenes from his book Naked Lunch. The idea of bringing Naked Lunch to the big-screen was Balch’s dream project. First developed in 1964, a script was completed in the early 1970s which would have adapted the book as a musical. Personal differences between Balch and the film’s would-be leading man Mick Jagger caused the project’s collapse.
Lesson #1 for Electric Guitar[1] was the first album released by Glenn Branca, originally in 1980 on 99 Records as a mini-album. It was re-released in a remastered form in 2004 by Acute Records and is variously classified as no wave or noise rock. It combines punk aesthetics with those classical music.
Downtown music is a name given to the New York music scene from the 1960s to the 1980s. A scene that suppposedly began in 1960, when Yoko Ono — one of the Fluxus artists, at that time still seven years away from meeting John Lennon — opened her SoHo loft to be used as a performance space for a series curated by La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield.
Ali Akbar Khan (April 14, 1922 – June 19, 2009) was an Indian sarod player. Khan was the first Indian musician to record an LP album of Indian classical music in the United States and to play sarod on American television. He came to prominence during the first and second waves of world music, otherwise known as the cultural appropriation of non-western music.
![Stonewall riots @40[1] The Stonewall riots were a series of violent conflicts between New York City police officers and groups of gay and transgender people that began during the early morning of June 28, 1969, and lasted several days. Also called the Stonewall Rebellion or simply Stonewall, the clash was a watershed for the worldwide gay rights movement, as gay and transgender people had never before acted together in such large numbers to forcibly resist police. From the New York Times of June 29, 1969: HUNDREDS OF YOUNG MEN WENT ON A RAMPAGE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, shortly after 3 A.M. yesterday after a force of plain-clothes men raided a bar that the police said was well known for its homo-sexual clientele. Thirteen persons were arrested and four policemen injured. The young men threw bricks, bottles, garbage, pennies and a parking meter at the policemen, who had a search warrant authorizing them in investigate reports that liquor was sold illegally at the bar, the Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square.—New York Times, June 29, 1969[2] The Sanctuary epitomized the post-Stonewall era, when gay men had won the right to dance intimately together without worrying about the police.](http://22.media.tumblr.com/Y3KxdEiQup9bs39weHt9Eiebo1_400.gif)
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