After hearing psychedelic music, I became a rock music fan and went to many concerts. In the early 1970s, the general trend was for pompous, self-involved rock theatrics. The beatnik notion of “poet-is-priest” became “rock star-is-priest,” and the rock concert audience was transformed into a hedonized mass, generating a group consciousness orchestrated by the rock singer. As at a church service or football game, the audience was enticed to sing along or raise lit matches in unison. Two concerts changed everything for me: one by Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, the other was a concert by Iggy and the Stooges at a small biker bar in Wayne, Michigan.

The two shows were quite different. Sun Ra’s shows at this time were huge, showy and spectacular. The stage was filled with tons of equipment and his “Arkestra,” as well as dancers, and props. The aesthetic was a mixture of African music, exotica, big band, science fiction, Greek chorus, and political rally. It was unlike anything I had ever seen or heard. The audience would be excited into a dancing frenzy by throbbing, African-style drumming, then Sun Ra, or Mr. Mystery, as he would sometimes call himself, would start to fuck with your head, shifting at breakneck speed from schmaltzy big-band arrangements to strange neo-Egyptian poetry and long nonsense chants, to weird skits about “outer space employment agencies.” You were constantly being asked to abruptly shift gears. At one point you might be swept up bodily only to be dropped on your ass by twenty minutes of harsh, electronic white noise. It was the most intellectually and physically demanding show I have ever seen. Afterward I climbed a fence, got backstage, and met Sun Ra. He was very approchable. When asked how his show differed from James Brown’s equally elaborate, but more pleasure-oriented performance, Sun Ra replied, “James Brown gives the people what they want; I give them what they need.”

During an intense winter snowstorm, I braved hitchhiking from Ann Arbor through to a particularly redneck rural area outside Detroit to see the Stooges. When I arrived at the “club,” I found it was a small biker bar. I was the first one there. Passing the time, I asked the bouncer, a huge, fat biker, whether he had ever seen the Stooges. “No,” he said, “But if the prick throws up on stage, I’m going to kick his ass.” When the Stooges arrived, Iggy was dressed in a ridiculous jazz-dancer’s outfit, a kind of leotard with a spangled skirt. His eyes were sloppily ringed with eyeliner, and a cigarette drooped from his lips. His whole demeanor said, “Fuck you.” I could feel the current of hatred spread through the bikers. Iggy was the total front man; the rest of the band barely moved. They stood stiff and erect like store window dummies, their faces blank. They were the perfect foil; all eyes were focused on Iggy, a master of body gesture. Every move was charged, and his moronic, contorted dancing seemed inspired, like an acrobat possessed by the spirit of an epileptic Jerry Lewis. The show started off simply enough, with a few upbeat rock tunes that get the crowd going. Iggy incited the audience to respond to him, got them heated up—they want Iggy. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped, singling out a girl pushed up against the stage, one of the fans to whom a second earlier he had been gesturing and enticing. The room went silent.

“Get this bitch out of here. She tried to touch me! We won’t play unless she is removed.” The tension started to build. She moved out of sight. Then Iggy asked, “What do you want to hear?” The crowd yelled back an incomprehensible roar of song titles.

“Oh… ‘Louie Louie.’”

So the band launched into “Louie Louie.” It’s hard to explain now what “Louie, Louie” meant at that time, when rock music was trying to be important. It was the first song a hillbilly rocker would learn on his guitar to impress the girls at a school dance—a throwback to an embarrassing time when rock music was entertainment for fraternity boys, not an instrument of social change. It was a slap in the face to the audience. But they politely suffered through it, even good-naturedly hoopin’ and hollerin’ a little bit.

Then Iggy asked again, “What do you want to hear?” The same roar came back.

“Oh… ‘Louie Louie.’”

And the band tore into “Louie, Louie” for a second time. “Louie, Louie” was played three times in a row. The audience was starting to get antsy. The band did another rocker and the audience regained its faith, only to have Iggy pull some other disruptive stunt.

He was an amazing performer. I have never seen better. He played the audience like a fish. The crowd was in the palm of his hand. They would suffer insult after insult, have their faces rubbed over and over again in their own complicity, and come running back for more. This doesn’t sound like much after fifteen years of punk music, in which these stage antics are the norm. But Iggy invented this stuff.

After about five or six songs, a big biker shouted, “Hey! Poodle Boy,” and hit Iggy with an egg. The next thing I saw Iggy doing a belly flop into the audience; and then a riot broke out—a real traditional biker bar fistfight. Chairs and tables overturned, the place was cleared within fifteen minutes. The lights were turned up, the band had run out the door, and I was left standing standing there babbling, “What happened?” It was the best piece of theater I have ever seen.

Everything of major importance I know about performing, I learned from these two concerts.

Brechtian Theatre Techniques, by Mike Kelley

R.I.P.

Sebastian Hempel

FRANCES STARK PERFORMS I’VE HAD IT AND A HALF

Due to the adult themes of some of the material contained in this afternoon’s program, this performance may not be suitable for all audiences.

Last summer Frances Stark staged a performance at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen entitled I’ve Had it and I’ve also Had it, which reworked a musical that debuted there in 1951. In the original “I’ve Had It!” a bellhop loses his girlfriend to a critically acclaimed composer, who is in town working on a new commissioned piece. To win her back he exposes the pretentious composer as a fraud by demonstrating, for a room full of critics, that the new composition is actually a familiar pop song, played backward. Stark’s performance I’ve Had it and a Half is an epilogue for that piece, as well as a prologue for her a new theatrical production (commissioned by Performa) which will debut in New York City in the fall.

In conjunction with the exhibition All of this and nothing

ALL HAMMER PUBLIC PROGRAMS ARE FREE. Tickets are required, and are available at the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start time. Limit one ticket per person on a first come, first served basis. Hammer members receive priority seating, subject to availability. Reservations not accepted, RSVPs not required.

Parking is available under the museum for $3 after 6:00pm.

Hammer Museum

*Witold Gombrowicz

“Born in Flames poses the question of whether oppression against women will be eliminated under any kind of social system. […] It is a fantasy presenting a group of women who, confronted with the very ‘ordinary’ oppression women have been experiencing for decades, refuse to take it any longer and become armed fighters against the government. Their position is that oppression against women is not eliminated automatically with ‘socialism’ – not only do political values have to change, cultural values must change and become embedded in practice.”
— Lizzie Borden in Heresies #16, 1983

The book we aim to publish is an illustrated transcript of Lizzie Borden’s mythical 1983 film ‘Born in Flames’, edited and designed by Finnish independent graphic designer Kaisa Lassinaro. By borrowing from multiple genres (film script, comic book, ‘photo-roman’), Lassinaro’s book is not only visually stunning but also fascinating to read. With your help we can attract new attention to the film and the still urgent issues it raises.

The book also includes an interview with Lizzie Borden, conducted by Kaisa Lassinaro in early 2011, and the lyrics of Undercover Nation by The Bloods and Born in Flames by Red Crayola, supplied by Adele Bertei and Mayo Thompson.

Size A4, 32 pages, soft cover, full-colour throughout

We hope to raise £3,727 by 15 April 2011, in order to get the book out by June 2011.
Please donate now!

Visit their donation page for more information and benefits.

Via Fredrik Sterner

In Search of the Miraculous

In anticipation towards / preparation for the potentiality of total Planetary Shutdown (as has been predicted by the Mayans, NASA, Terence MacKenna, the Nostradamus, possibly some Australophithecus proto-shaman named ‘Zhembg’, and many other interesting people), I am devoting the next 681 days to communicating the spectrum of paranoia which I believe can reorder the chaos of human existence into a super-prismic ultra-rainbow of utopian self-discovery. I will attempt to weave an exquisite tapestry made of theories, counter-theories, maths, lies, stories, speculations, strategies of survival, proposals for responsible hedonism, temporary autonomous zones, and general psychogeographic meanderings. I will tap into a network of like-minded decoders of human knowledge in the attempt to gather and exchange data, experiences, fears, hopes, etc. in a feedback loop of triumphant futility.

ENJOY (approximately) 681 DAYS IN THE (100%) PARTY-ZONE.

Shred the next 600-odd days with my dear pal Joey Ryken.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

Via Super Secret Pow Wow.