Lawrence Weiner is an American artist who made visual poetry and who wrote the art manifesto “Declaration of Intent” (1968).
He designed the Quando Quango and Section 25 poster for Factory Records in 1985.
With Ned Sublette, he released the albums Ships At Sea, Sailors & Shoes (1993) and Monsters from the Deep (1997).
In Antwerp, his poem “Iron and gold in the air, dust and smoke on the ground” is on permanent display at the Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum.
Clare Peploe was a British-Italian film director and screenwriter (Zabriskie Point, 1970).
Luck has it that there is a complete version of Zabriskie Point on YouTube.
B. J. Thomas was an American singer best known for interpreting the song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”, a song written by by Hal David and Burt Bacharach.
Gene Youngblood is an American writer best known for his book Expanded Cinema (1970). The book is a typical product of 1960s counter-cultural utopianism.
Contrary to the usual 1960s utopianism, Youngblood’s utopianism is not focused on politics but on form.
Central to this book is the predicted advent of a new noosphere. Noosphere is a concept coined by Teilhard de Chardin (along with Vladimir Vernadsky).
Norman J. Warren was an English film director known for such films as Satan’s Slave (1976), Prey (1977) and Terror (1978).
He is also credited with one of the first narrative sex films, Her Private Hell.
He is interviewed in the Doing Rude Things 1995 documentary from 28:45 onwards.
Larry Flynt was the publisher of American pornographic magazine Hustler, founded in 1974 in the slipstream of the sexual revolution.
I show you an interview from 2014.
In the opening splash you see — at the right hand side — the controversial cover of a woman who is fed to a meat grinder.
Flynt was a rebel. Many pornographers were. That’s what used to make pornography so interesting during the early modern period up until the sexual revolution.
Jerry Jeff Walker was an American musician best known for writing “Mr. Bojangles“.
Walker recorded “Mr. Bojangles” too, but when I hear that song I’m invariably only reminded of the heavily orchestrated version by the great Nina Simone.
The Nina Simone version wormed itself into my head in 2006 via the compilation Nova Classics 07 released on Radio Nova, keepers of musical taste in the early 2000s.
Nina first released on her cover album Here Comes the Sun from 1971.
Mac Davis was American singer-songwriter best-known for writing “In the Ghetto“.
Shere Hite (1942 – 2020) was a American-born German sex educator and feminist. Her sexological work focused primarily on female sexuality.
She is best-known for her book The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976) which is in several ways a successor to Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response (1966) and Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).
In this book, she permanently devaluated the coitus in favour of more attention for the clitoris.
She is the last great feminist. Perhaps only equalled by Camille Paglia (born 1947). Nancy Friday (1933 – 2017) is another famous feminist of that generation.