Dewey Martin - RIP

Dewey Martin former drummer with the Buffalo Springfield is dead.

Story here.

Buffalo Springfield - 'For What It's Worth' (Monterey 1967)

47 degrees of perspiration

The hottest February day in recorded history here in Melbourne.
Not only stinking hot but also a northerly wind coming straight from the central land mass that brought with it so much soil dust that at times reached 80 kms an hour!.
Also the whole sky was just filled with smoke all day.
The change eventually came through and tomorrow looks like being a much cooler day.
Thank god!

UPDATE:

Fourteen killed in Kinglake ( which has been completely wiped out), Wandong, Strathewen and Clonbinane, northwest of Melbourne.

More than 60 houses reported to be lost.
At least 30,000 hectares burnt out, started around 4km east of Kilmore and winds pushed it 30km to the east through Whittlesea, Wandong and into Kinglake. Was also threatening Broadford late Saturday night.
There are reports just in that it is feared that the death toll could be as high as 40.

Obama changes tone

"...In a fired-up, mostly impromptu speech to House Democrats in Williamsburg, Va., Thursday night, Obama accused his Republican critics of wanting to return to “the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin.”
“I don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV,” he said. "If you’re headed for a cliff, you have to change direction. That’s what the American people called for in November, and that’s what we intend to deliver.”..."

Full Story from 'Politico' here.

Iggy Pop & irate 'fan' - Toronto 1981

"I have the key to the mysteries of all things wanted, and here it is: Doo dum dum ..."

Leonard Cohen - Melbourne 5/02/09
(Photo TimN)

Start here on May 11, 2008 at the Fredericton Playhouse Canada and keep following the links and you will get reviews/setlists and videos of every concert of this world tour that brought us to this point.
My thoughts on this truly profound experience (and that is not a word that I often use in regards to this crazy thing called rock'n'roll I can assure you) will hopefully appear here tomorrow.

Hallelujah - Melbourne 5/02/09

לא נראה כמוך שוב

'Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.'
Leonard Cohen - Melbourne 5/02/09

(Photos by TimN)

In case you are wondering the Hebrew reads 'we will not see your like again' (I hope).

Setlist

Leonard Cohen - Melbourne 5/02/09
(Photo TimN)

THE BAND
Leonard Cohen - vocals, acoustic guitar, keyboard.
Roscoe Beck - bass, double bass, background vocals
Neil Larsen - keyboards, Hammond B3, accordion
Bob Metzger - guitar, steel guitar, background vocals
Javier Mas - bandurria, laud, archilaud
Rafael Bernardo Gayol - drums, percussion
Dino Soldo - keyboard, saxophone, wind instruments, dobro, background vocals
Sharon Robinson - vocals, shaker
Hattie Webb - vocals, harp
Charley Webb - vocals, guitar

Thanx to Crimpies over at the Leonard Cohen forum for the setlist.

Leonard Cohen - Rod Laver Arena Melbourne February 5 2009

Leonard Cohen - Melbourne 5/02/09
(Photo by TimN)

Just returned home from this amazing, uplifting and truly inspiring concert.

There will be much, much more later I promise.

In the meantime I give you Leonard Cohen's recitation of 'A Thousand Kisses Deep' & 'If It Be Your Will' as performed by the absolutely sublime cartwheeling (!) Webb sisters.

"You came to me this morning
And you handled me like meat.
You´d have to be a man to know
How good that feels, how sweet.
My mirror twin, my next of kin,
I´d know you in my sleep.
And who but you would take me in
A thousand kisses deep?

I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat.
I´m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet,
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second-hand physique -
With all he is, and all he was
A thousand kisses deep.

All soaked in sex, and pressed against
The limits of the sea:
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me.
We made it to the forward deck
I blessed our remnant fleet -
And then consented to be wrecked
A thousand kisses deep.

I know you had to lie to me,
I know you had to cheat.
But the Means no longer guarantee
The Virtue in Deceit.
That truth is bent, that beauty spent,
That style is obsolete -
Ever since the Holy Spirit went
A thousand kisses deep.

(So what about this Inner Light
That´s boundless and unique?
I´m slouching through another night
A thousand kisses deep.)

I´m turning tricks; I´m getting fixed,
I´m back on Boogie Street.
I tried to quit the business -
Hey, I´m lazy and I´m weak.
But sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go
A thousand kisses deep.

(And fragrant is the thought of you,
The file on you complete -
Except what we forgot to do
A thousand kisses deep.)

The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
You win a while, and then it´s done -
Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it´s real
A thousand kisses deep.

(I jammed with Diz and Dante -
I did not have their sweep -
But once or twice, they let me play
A thousand kisses deep.)

And I´m still working with the wine,
Still dancing cheek to cheek.
The band is playing "Auld Lang Syne" -
The heart will not retreat.
And maybe I had miles to drive,
And promises to keep -
You ditch it all to stay alive
A thousand kisses deep.

And now you are the Angel Death
And now the Paraclete;
And now you are the Savior's Breath
And now the Belsen heap.
No turning from the threat of love,
No transcendental leap -
As witnessed here in time and blood
A thousand kisses deep."

Lux Interior - RIP

(Photo by Theresa K)

Erick Lee Purkhiser
(October 21, 1948 - February 4, 2009)
Lead singer of The Cramps.

The Official Statement (from Girlie Action, The Cramps’ media representatives):
For Immediate Release:
February 4, 2009
Lux Interior, lead singer of The Cramps, passed away this morning due to an existing heart condition at Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale, California at 4:30 AM PST today. Lux has been an inspiration and influence to millions of artists and fans around the world. He and wife Poison Ivy’s contributions with The Cramps have had an immeasurable impact on modern music.
The Cramps emerged from the original New York punk scene of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, with a singular sound and iconography. Their distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom. He is a rare icon who will be missed dearly.
The family requests that you respect their privacy during this difficult time.

'Tear It Up'

'Goo Goo Muck'

More Videos here and here and here.
Get the Ohio 1979 demos here.
Finally this will get you a whole heap of goodies!!!
Great fan site here.

I wanna leave a happy memory
when I go, I wanna leave something
to let the whole world know,
that the rock in roll daddy has
a done passed on, but my bones
will keep a rockin' long after I've gone


Roll on
Rock on
Raw Bones
Well I still got all the rythem in these
Rockin' Bones

Well when I die don't you burry
me at all, Just nail my bonesup on
the wall, Beneath these bones let
these words be seen, "This is the
bloody gears of a
boppin' machine"

Roll on
Rock on
Raw Bones
Well I still got all the rythem in these
Rockin' Bones

BIG thanx to Luke & Bella for passing on the sad news.

J.G. Ballard - Crash (Directed by Harley Cokliss 1971 Starring J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake)

From: Ballardian:The World Of J.G. Ballard.

NARRATOR: In slow motion, the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding behind them the coils that ran to the metering devices by the impact zone. As they collided the debris of wings and fender floated into the air. The cars rocked against each as they continued on their disintegrating courses. In the passenger seats the plastic models transcribed graceful arcs into the buckling roofs and windshields. Here and there a passing fender severed a torso. The air behind the cars was a carnival of arms and legs.

J.G. BALLARD: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.

We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.

The styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important, bringing together all sorts of visual and psychological factors. As an engineering structure, the car is totally uninteresting to me. I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality — for example, that the future is something with a fin on it — and the whole system of expectations contained in the design of the car, expectations about our freedom to move through time and space, about the identities of our own bodies, our own musculatures, the complex relationships between ourselves and the world of objects around us. These highly potent visual codes can be seen repeatedly in every aspect of the 20th century landscape. What do they mean? Have we reached a point now in the 70s where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself, and that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyse and understand the huge significance of this metallised dream.

I’m interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario that describes our real lives and our real fantasies. If every member of the human race were to vanish overnight, I think it would be possible to reconstitute almost every element of human psychology from the design of a vehicle like this. As a writer I feel I must try to understand the real meaning of a lot of commonplace but tremendously complicated events. I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car.

NARRATOR: Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the door frame, and its self extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.

J.G. BALLARD: The close relationship between our own bodies and the body of the motor car is obvious. American automobile stylists have been exploring for years the relationship between sexuality and the motor car body, the primitive algebra of recognition which we use in our perception of all organic forms. If the man in the motor car is the key image of the 20th century, then the automobile crash is the most significant trauma. The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide.

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality? It’s always struck me that people’s attitudes towards the car crash are very confused, that they assume an attitude that in fact is very different from their real response. If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

I know that my own attitudes to the crashed car are just as confused. The distorted geometry of this tremendously stylised object: let’s face it, the most powerful symbol of our civilisation. It seems to pull at all sorts of concealed triggers in the mind: the postures of people in crashed vehicles; deformed manufacturer’s styling devices (crashed General Motors cars look very different from crashed Fords); the stylisation of the instrument panel, which after all is the model for our own wounds. Driving around, each of us knows what is literally the shape of our own death.

NARRATOR: Regaining consciousness, she stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart. She sat up, lifting herself from the broken steering wheel, uncertain for a moment whether the car windshield had been fractured. Against her forehead the strands of blood formed a torn veil. Above her knees, her hand moved towards the door lever. As she watched, the door opened and she fell out. Lifting herself, she held tightly to the car, feeling the pressure of the door slip against her hand. Turning, she stared at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis.

J.G. BALLARD: I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point. Metering coils trailed out of the windows and they had dummies sitting in them. They were beautifully filmed. They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. These cars were in head-on collisions, right-angled collisions and sideswipes. And ploughing into other structures like utility poles. One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.

I remember looking at these films and thinking about the strange psychological dimensions they seemed to touch. They seemed to say something about the way everything becomes more and more stylised, more and more cut off from ordinary feeling. It seems to me that we have to regard everything in the world around us as fiction, as if we were living in an enormous novel, and that the kind of distinction that Freud made about the inner world of the mind, between, say, what dreams appeared to be and what they really meant, now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. All the structures in it, flyovers and motorways, office blocks and factories, are all part of this enormous novel.

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

More exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created, that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality, that more and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world.

J.G. Ballard 1971.

Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss). NB: Gabrielle Drake is Nick Drake's sister. More Ballard here.

Bonus:'Warm Leatherette' by The Normal.
Inspired by Ballard's 'Crash' this was by Daniel Miller and was the first release from Mute Records.

Oh dear, oh dear!!!

According to 'The Times' sales of Country Life spreads are up 85% since the John Lydon ad campaign started.

Serge Gainsbourg 2008 exhibition - Paris

Go to 'The Weaklings' here and let Dennis Cooper take you through the exhibition dedicated to Serge Gainsbourg.
Please note that this exhibition has been extended until March 15th.

Sarah Palin's ongoing ariel wolf slaughter

Pete Doherty faces eviction

Pete Doherty pictured yesterday in Paris is facing eviction from his country pad following the broadcast of the MTV 24 Hours show. The Babyshambles frontman faces the threat of being turfed-out, due to the state he has let the house get in, reports The Sun. "We've had a few problems. It's high time Mr Doherty found somewhere else to live," the newspaper quotes The Earl Of Cardigan saying.

Skip McDonald & Adrian Sherwood discuss the last Little Axe album 'Bought For A Dollar, Sold For A Dime'