Cloris Leachman was an American actress with a long an fruitful career.
I give you a fragment from The Last Picture Show (1971) in which she is a wife angry at her husband.
And one set of fragments from the Young Frankenstein (1974), where she famously is Frau Blücher, and everytime her name is pronounced the horses start to whinny, neigh and rear.
Arik Brauer was an Austrian artist, co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism.
The work of Brauer strikes me as uninteresting.
Maybe I’m too harsh on this whole school of Vienna, but the only artist of that school who really impresses me is Johfra Bosschart.
Alberto Grimaldi was an Italian film producer known for producing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Last Tango in Paris, but more importantly for us, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini.
That Sodom film you don’t need to see to form an opinion about. It’s better just to read about it and let it lead you to the manuscript by Sade on which it was based.
That book has the lines:
“How many times, damn it, have I not desired that one could attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world”.
But I digress.
Guem was an Algerian musician, composer and dancer.
Guem is best known for his cult dancefloor recording “Le Serpent” (1978).
“Le Serpent” is a sibling to “Jingo” (1959) by Candido Camero, “New Bell” (1972) by Manu Dibango and “Road Close” (1984) by Tony Allen, who all died last year.
James Purify was an American singer.
He is best known for singing “I’m Your Puppet” (1966) with his brother. This song mixes well with “After Laughter (Comes Tears)” (1964).
Larry King was an American talk show host iconic in the 1990s. He was called the father of talk show democracy and was instrumental in the development of infotainment.
His whole era is captured by the superb documentary Spin.
In that documentary, he can be seen talking to G. W. Bush on the merits of the drug Halcion at 5:40.
Phil Spector was an American musician and record producer known for his Wall of Sound sound production.
The Wall of Sound was a very dense sound with little room for details of individual instruments, exemplified in recordings such as “Da Doo Ron Ron” “Be My Baby” or “Baby, I Love You”, all released in 1963.
There is, Phil Spector: He’s a Rebel, a documentary from 1982 on Phil Spector, without his cooperation , in which Albert Goldman is recorded as saying:
“Rock ‘n’ roll is basically institutionalized adolescence. And the bottom line of rock ‘n’ roll is that it’s a baby food industry and Phil found a new formula for baby food.”
I thought that was quite funny.
Michael Apted is a British director famous for a body of diverse films.
I give you Up (1964 – today).
The Up Series is a series of documentary films that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old.
So far the documentary has had eight episodes spanning 49 years (one episode every seven years).
The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child’s social class predetermines their future.
Jim Haynes was a cultural entrepreneur and leading member of the American-British underground. He was the co-founder of the Traverse Theatre in Scotland and International Times countercultural newspaper. He was also involved in Suck magazine and the Wet Dream Festival.
He was a source of fascination for me in the 1990s when my interest in the underground was at its highest.
There is very good footage of him in Naughty!, the amusing film in which he, somewhere backstage during the Wet Dream Festival, says:
“I’m just interested in freedom, extreme libertarianism, the right for anyone to see, eat and do whatever they want.”
and in true “make love, not war” style:
“Biafra children starving, that’s pornography.”
It is often said that history repeats itself. I wonder if the 1960s will repeat themselves. When? And are the 1960s a repetition of some previous libertarian era? I believe it has some elements unique to itself that will not be easily repeated. For one thing, the world has been globalized which makes all the circumstances different.
In accordance with the 1960s mythology of which Jim Haynes is part, by way of illustration of the repressive tolerance and ‘selling out’ concepts, I show above the advertising clip Jim Haynes recorded for Nestlé in order to promote their After Eight mints.
Remaining survivors born in 1933 in my book are Tinto Brass, Yoko Ono and Liliana Cavani.
RIP Jon Gibson was an American musician and visual artist.
Gibson’s death happened in 2020 but I forgot to give it attention.
Maybe I did not find the right record to play with it.
Today, via The Saturn Archives, a recently discovered high quality music channel on YouTube, I give you Two Solo Pieces (1977).
The beginning is a highly accomplished drone piece. The end is a piece with gamelan echoes.