The piece underscoring this trailer for the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey 1972 production Heat is John Cale’s Days Of Steam, from his album The Academy In Peril.
BeatBooks 56: Burroughs
A brown envelope I’m always glad to receive is that containing the latest BeatBooks catalogue.
Each quarter the arrival of the 8″ x 6″ booklet soon results in the tapping out of the url of the online order form for Andrew Sclanders’ site.
And the catalogues are treasurable in their own right.
Over the last decade or so Sclanders has carved out a niche for BeatBooks as collector central for all publications – literary, musical, graphic – springing from “beat” and moving through the counterculture and punk to the outer reaches of the avant-garde.
“It ain’t the Sistine Chapel…”
I heartily (groan…) recommend Alistair Sooke’s half-hour radio documentary on Milton Glaser’s I ♥ NY logo.
Glaser is interviewed, as are Seymour Chwast and Steven Heller among others.
The joys of Letterheady
According to Letterheady.com’s Shaun Usher, the adjective “letterheady” describes the feeling of being overcome by emotion at a strong letterhead design.
New age of plunder
Over on the Barney Bubbles Blog I’ve posted a piece about this design for the Blockhead EP by Punks Jump Up. See here.
A personal loss and the rash of suicides among young gay individuals in the US has prompted the creation of a two-sided poster as the latest project by art collective 2-UP .
No More Suicides is a collaboration between Adam Shecter (who founded 2-UP last year with partner Joe Winter) and poet Matthea Harvey, who suffered the loss of a friend at their own hand.
“One side is fantasy; Matthea’s poem imagines a fox constellation that looks after kids, and I draw an imaginary mascot for a LGBT kids TV show,” says Shecter.
Beat This: A Hip Hop History
Excerpt from 1983 BBC documentary Beat This: A Hip Hop History.
Blessed & Blasted: You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On! 10.1974
Sixty years after Blast, the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt adopted the same truculent tone and diffuse dialectic to ring the alarms amid a culture rendered flaccid by the failure of the 60s dream.
You’re Gonna Wake Up – which went on sale in SEX in the late autumn of 1974 – was conceived by Bernie Rhodes and realised with contributions from friends Malcolm McLaren (who wrote the slogan) and Gerry Goldstein.
Of course, it is best known for carrying the following band name: “Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS”.
I investigated its history in THE LOOK and also here. By publishing the list with links today I aim to dive deeper to demonstrate the tract’s range beyond popular culture.
Hence the references to artists David Holmes, Mel Ramos and Patrick Heron (and his campaign against The Tate), the literature of Alfred Bester, David Cooper, George Dangerfield, Konstantin Paustovsky and Bernard Wolfe, the work of radical journalists Alexander Cockburn and Mervin Jones and the campaigning of political activists Pat Arrowsmith and Marian and Doloures Price.
Such content dates the compilation to October 1974: The Guardian published Heron’s 14,000-word Tate critique over consecutive days between the 12th and 14th of that month; the shirt itself mentions a piece by Jones in the New Statesman on October 4 and also an Elton John interview in the NME on September 25 (in fact the issue was dated September 28).
Alongside the call-girl phone number taken from local newsagents there are such quizzical references as that for former Playboy Club UK head Victor Lownes: “To be avoided first thing in the morning”.
Is this because one of the contributors had encountered him leaving his club Stocks, just a few hundred yards from SEX along the King’s Road?
Blessed & Blasted: BLAST 1. 06.1914
Wyndham Lewis’ 1914 publication Blast 1 is the daddy of the modern aesthetic manifesto.
It’s also a Modernist objet d’art.
Iconoclastic and satiric, at times inchoate and irrational, Blast’s aim was to establish Vorticism‘s endorsement of the machine age and and simultaneous disavowal of the stultifying Romantic legacy of the Victorian era.
Memories of SEX in Forum magazine
SEX became a magical place. People spent hours there; no one wanted to leave. In it, I created a feeling that was both euphoric and hysterical. You felt an enormous range of possibilities – that whatever was happening couldn’t be predicted, but it was a movement toward a place unknown.
Malcolm McLaren, Musical Paintings [JRP Ringier 2008].
One of the most prescient pieces published about 430 King’s Road in its incarnation as SEX appeared, appropriately enough, in sex magazine Forum in the mid-70s.
And, after more than 35 years, I’ve tracked down the writer and the photographer who, for the first time anywhere, recall the revolutionary retail environment and the sexually-charged photo-shoot featuring future Sex Pistol Steve Jones, performer Chrissie Hynde, radical shop assistant Jordan, film-writer Alan Jones and, of course, Vivienne Westwood.
The feature appeared in the June 1976 issue of the magazine and was written by expat American Forum staffer Len Richmond, later to pen hit British sitcom Agony and Three’s Company (the US version of the UK’s Man About The House). The photographer was Chelsea-based freelance David Dagley.
“In 1973 I’d arrived in the UK from San Francisco with 300 bucks in my pocket and found that I could work as a journalist because nobody cared about whether I had a green card,” explains Richmond down the line from Los Angeles.