Why We Do This « Wow Cool

Stalker is an astounding film that you simply must see.

Go to nostalghia.com for all the Tarkovsky info you could ever want.
You can watch just about every film Tarkovsky made and much more online. Here’s a convenient gateway.

Stalker is also available on DVD Sadly no Criterion edition yet.

Found via Rock, Paper, Shotgun

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

Adam Curtis may be the greatest journalist of our age. Yes, whatever, or whenever, that is… He is certainly one of its greatest documentarians. His skilled use of the video medium – in films that demand that you both look and listen to get the full effect – persuasively show and tell that things are not quite as you have been told (and shown). His most recent work – All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – named for the Richard Brautigan poem of the same name – seems particularly relevant in light of the spread of the current Occupy movement. This documentary series also gives perspective on the origins of aspects of the Tea Party Movement and the influence of Ayn Rand in particular. Strangely, one of the greatest proselytizers of Randian Objectivism – especially in Canada and the Northern mid-west – the rock band Rush, is not mentioned.

You will want to pay regular visits to Curtis’ blog at the BBC. His access to their archives has leant him unique incite into many of the world’s recent shaking events.

Watch All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace on Archive.org.

Art Clokey Was Born 90 Years Ago Today

The Google tribute is all kinds of awesome. I made the above video with my son last year.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Occupy Wall Street: The General Assembly

I was just sent this by Scott Beibin, who worked on it, and am sharing it. I’m a little behind on what is going on in New York at the moment, so playing catchup now. Whatever your view, this is pretty major and you should stay informed. This video makes an interesting gateway into the datastream.

I’ve been watching the news enough to think that is very likely that London is going to erupt over the next few days. The City of London, commonly just, The City, is one of the largest financial services centers in the world. It has just been revealed that half the donations to the Tories have come from that sector. The Conservative Party Conference is underway. In the meanwhile, you see articles like this one in the Guardian about how great the $100 Million Lloyd’s building is and you can start to get a little steamed too. So… Occupy the City? I can’t wait to read what Charlie Brooker has to say.

More info: Adbusters Occupy Wall Street Page

Call-To-Action: How Music Fans Can Show Support For Indie Labels Affected By The PIAS Warehouse Fire in London

Among all the sorry carnage and sad tales left by London’s looting fraternity over the last three days, perhaps the most devastating for music lovers was the huge fire that destroyed a Sony warehouse primarily used by independent distribution company PIAS.

A three-story, 20,000 square meter storage home for music from a number of independent labels from the UK and the US including 4AD, Beggars Group, Dead Oceans, Def Jux, Domino, Jagjaguwar, Matador, Ninja Tune, Polyvinyl, Rough Trade, Secretly Canadian, Side One Dummy, Silva Screen, Sub Pop, Too Pure, True Panther, Vagrant, Warp, XL among others. (A full list from PIAS’s website is here). The warehouse was a temporary home for releases from all manner of indie labels and offshoots, and the extent of its destruction is starting to become tragically apparent. While the full impact of last night’s events is still emerging, numerous indies have confirmed massive losses. Beggars Chairman Martin Mills called it a “horrible” setback for the indie sector.

What music fans can do to show their support for the indie label community, and help them survive this disaster is to buy a digital download of an album from any one of the digital retailers going to their local record store while stocks last.

This way, the labels will be able to remanufacture their CD’s and vinyl more quickly, to resupply the record shops who are also affected by the riots.

Alison Wenham, Chairman and CEO of AIM, the UK’s Trade Association for the Independent Music Industry commented: “This is a disaster for the music community, but with the fans’ help, labels and artists will survive. Please show your support for the music community by buying a digital album from an independent label today”.

Reposted from A2IM.

UPDATE – “In Wake of London Fire, Organizers Answers Questions About Supporting Indie Labels” – by Peter Kirn on Create Digital Music. Includes news on PIAS’ fund to help labels and an interview with the organizers of “Label Love”

More news on DigitalMusicNews.com | BBC | The Guardian’s UK Riots page

IFC – Indie Film Distributor also hit hard

Several book stores have also been ransacked, including several comic book shops and the UK’s oldest queer book store.

Support Pegacorn Press on IndieGoGo

Pegacorn Press from Caroline Paquita on Vimeo.

Big thanks to Doug Rogers – formerly of God Hates Computers and Chased & Smashed – for turning me on to this new publishing project led by great great artist Caroline Paquita. Caroline is starting a small queer, feminist, total-art-freaker publishing house called PEGACORN PRESS. Through your help, she hopes to raise funds for new and better equipment to make this easier and all the more possible. Help pitch in to make this a reality over on IndieGoGo.

Books, Books, Books!

So, here we are, at long last, with the sequel to the “Lost Awesome Book Cover Designs” post. Unlike that previous posting, I can thoroughly endorse these ten covers as being very awesome. I’ve been collecting these in the last several months. You will quickly noticed that they have been arranged in a chromatic and/or thematic order. The images link to the books’ pages on Amazon. And, yes, I am selling these. I’ve got to raise money to get my next record out somehow. Give a little love if you like and buy these babies. Otherwise, watch this space and be sure to get the upcoming blasts from myself and the many other Wow Cool artists that are coming your way very soon from Wow Cool.
Continue reading Books, Books, Books!

The Beauty of Urban Decay 2

As documented earlier, we continue to build with either no real purpose to the buildings themselves or no realistic plan to sustainably maintain these buildings. There is much glorious decay that remains to be explored by the intrepid and the foolish. Infiltration zine has done a great deal to lead the way.

A hot topic recently has been that of the Chinese Ghost Cities. A Sino-Housing Bubble of a scale appropriate to the nation that happens to have the most damn people on earth living under it. Get the satellite view here.

In case you thought we might be the heck super efficient in land use here in the West, I would like to send you to this report on the UK’s Post Office Railway. You will want to read all of it and take in every photo.

In the meanwhile, for something that just quite resembles context for our position here, I request that you read these interviews with Simon Reynolds on Ballardian: “Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling” from 2007 and ‘Magisterial, precise, unsettling part 2’ from 2009.

The Center for PostNatural History on We Make Money Not Art

My colleague Richard Pell is profiled on We Make Money Not Art this week and you should go read that. Not convinced? It starts like this: “If you want to see a penguin, you go to the zoo. If you’re curious about dinosaurs and dodos, any natural history museum will enlighten you. But where do you go if you want to learn about spider silk-producing goats, anti-malarial mosquitoes, fluorescent zebrafish or the terminator gene?”

The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature and biotechnology. The PostNatural refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering. The mission of the Center for PostNatural History is to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.

The Center for PostNatural History website

My portrait of Richard Pell

Keep Reading Frenzy Alive!

Reading Frenzy – An Independent Press Emporium is a small, specialty bookshop/gallery/event space in Portland, Oregon. They are having a rough patch at the moment and could use your patronage. The full message from RF follows.

The image you see above is the beautiful print that Aaron Renier created for us, No Book Ever Ends. If only we could say the same for bookstores. Every few years Reading Frenzy hits a point of financial crisis. That time has come again. As you know we’re a tiny, specialty shop devoted to independent, small and self-published titles. Reading Frenzy is more than a just store though — it’s an art exhibit and event space, a hub of cultural activity, and a community resource. It’s been a struggle to make it through the past 2+ years of the recession and we’re proud that we have. We’ve done that with a skeletal inventory and cutting back on staff and other expenses, as well as being resourceful and creative. We’ve simply reached the point where these measures are no longer sufficient.

Continue reading Keep Reading Frenzy Alive!

Quick Hits for a Thursday

Some vital recent cultural moments you may have missed.

The multi-talented Mark Sunshine (singer of Monster Magnet splinter faction Riot God and an artist most awesome) has updated his site again. Minimal, bold, and links to greatness.

Sam McPheeters of Vermiform/Born Against/etc. fame has released a collection of his early 1990s Hardcore Punk Zine Dear Jesus, as a velo-bound collection. Wow Cool still has a few copies of the first of his Shooting Space zine available.

Dear Jesus was a hardcore punk fanzine I produced between 1989 and 1992. There were four full issues, and a mini-issue I made 50 copies of and sold at one show in 1990. Everything is included in this collection. The anthology totals 140 pages, with a new intro, color cover, and sturdy velo binding. More work by Sam is available on BuyOlympia.com.

These five issues include interviews with Jello Biafra, Richie Birkenhead (of Underdog & Youth Of Today), Doc Dart (this is the piece that led, 17 years later, to my Vice Magazine profile “The Troublemaker”), Econochrist, Lifesblood, CBGB owner Hilly Kristal, Ian MacKaye, Maximumrocknroll, Mike BS (of ABC No Rio), Mykel Board (of MRR), Nation Of Ulysses (pictorial), Nausea, Neanderthal, No For An Answer, Revelation Records, Rorschach, Soulside, Supertouch, artist Seth Tobocman, Swiz, and Tit Wrench. This collection also includes articles on the first Gulf War, punk in Latin America, an extensive Born Against tour diary, and many, many painfully opinionated reviews. Dear Jesus was one of the most consistent hardcore punk zines to document the early 1990′s ABC No Rio scene in New York. If this is a historical period that interests you, then this is perhaps something you will want to own.

Last, and far from least. Today’s absolute must-read is this post from Adam Curtis on his blog at the BBC – “RUPERT MURDOCH – A PORTRAIT OF SATAN“
Related Reading: Charlie Brooker’s “Q: When does a tabloid become crude propaganda? A: When it starts printing it” in the Guardian.

Enjoy

Easy Wizards

This book is an endless source of wonder and speculation. I can spend hours imagining the adventures of the Easy Wizards. I saw this little sticker book randomly in one of those little over-priced toy stores that inexplicably thrive in the strip-malls of central California. “You gotta be kidding. I mean, you know who this is, man? This is Captain America. I’m Billy. Hey, we’re headliners baby. We played every fair in this part of the country. I mean, for top dollar, too!” -Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.

Captain Beefheart – Best Batch Yet

Former Magic Band drummer Robert Williams posted this to his MySpace blog this morning. It is an astounding performance. If you can wrap your head around it, then you might get a bit why people can get so crazy about the music of Captain Beefheart. I love how chunky the bass is in this.

R.I.P. Don Van Vliet – Captain Beefheart

It might be going too far to say that none of this (Wow Cool, Brown Cuts Neighbors, etc….) wouldn’t be here without Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band… but it wouldn’t be going very far from the truth. I tend to spend much of my casual thinking time thinking in music, and much of it is the music of Don Van Vliet. My octave range may not be as great as Don’s, but I can hum and whistle in some pretty right on it pitch.

I’m obviously avoiding the issue here.

Despite about 17 years since his last public appearance in the Some Yo Yo Stuff film and a quarter century plus since the Magic Band was last active, the death of Don Van Vliet on Friday, December 17, 2010, has had a profound affect on me and many others around the world.

Here is the Guardian’s obituary of Don.

There will be much more posted here in the next few days about the greatness of Captain Beefheart, For now, here are a few videos that you simply have to watch.

More after the jump Continue reading R.I.P. Don Van Vliet – Captain Beefheart

Music Monday: Nuisance – Attractive Nuisance demo

It’s not a big secret that I am a huge fan of Nuisance. I booked them twice for shows in Western Massachusetts. Once at a spectacularly disastrous warehouse show in Florence (at the Arts & Industry building, now home to Ecstatic Peace/Father Yod, then the home to Wow Cool, Al Columbia and Sebadoh); and again at the Majestic Theater in Easthampton. The Majestic apparently burned down in 2007. The Arts & Industry show had a small getting busted by the cops problem which eventually cost me 50 bucks. I have several blurry black and white photos of the warehouse show and full video of Nuisance’s set at the Majestic (as well as some of Doc Hopper and Beef, who opened). I wrote about these shows a bit in Andy’s Chair printed zines numbers 2 and 3. Those photos and video are very likely to show up online sometime next year. In the meanwhile, today’s gem showed up online… coming to me somehow or other through the facebook. It’s a demo tape from 1987(?) with 5 songs. They are: Your House, Brighter Flower, Censorship Song, Waiting Room, and Days Of Sun.

Nuisance’s albums on Lookout are available on iTunes: Confusion Hill | Sunny Side Down or as CDs on Amazon: Confusion Hill | Sunny Side Down

Music Monday: Kill Your Pet Puppy

So… you’ve read Rip It Up and Start Again, and Simon Reynolds follow-up Totally Wired, and are ass-deep in post-punk lore and legend and spend your days wandering the record stalls humming “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” by the Pop Group. And you start to wonder… “Can I plunge any teh further down thee rabbit hole” Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You really can. Somewhere while digging up some background for my few bits on the late Peter Christopherson the other day (see previous post), I stumbled across the impossible time-sink of a music blog Kill Your Pet Puppy. I was looking for a copy of the fanzine by CRASS, Toxic Grafity, and discovered KYPP. Strangely, or not so much, the worlds of CRASS and other anarcho-punk goings on, were not so far separate from the industrial goings-on by G. P’Orridge and crew. The signs are clearly visible in street art of that era and later. Further digging led me to find that M’Colleague at Maximum RockNRoll, Paul, had flagged it for blog of the week a few weeks back. It’s hard to encapsulate the wonders to be found within KYPP… You just need to dive in.

In the meanwhile, speaking of the Pop Group… I would love to see this full documentary – “Mark Stewart – ON/OFF – Pop Group to Maffia”. I contacted Monitorpop to try to find out what had become of this film, but have heard nothing back yet.

UPDATE: I somehow failed to mention that The Pop Group have reformed, and are playing two shows on the last two days of 2010, with Sonic Youth in Manchester and London. More info, photos, video and a history of the band are on the Pop Group’s site.

R.I.P. Peter Christopherson

Peter, P2, Krems, originally uploaded by Chris_Carter_.

Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson has often been the man behind the scenes in his 35+ year career in music. He was known and celebrated as a pioneer in electronic and industrial music, sampling and video – first with Throbbing Gristle – and in the last 30 years with his own long-running Coil project (from 1982 until co-conspirator Jhonn Balance’s death in 2004), Psychic TV, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Rage Against the Machine and many more. But much of his work – the stuff your mom probably was aware of – was behind the scenes. He often portrayed himself in this boy in the back room image in Coil publicity shots. Little about his biography indicates that he was very shy. But it seems clear he had his hands firmly on the controls creating images and video for Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel (his first three solo album covers), Paul McCartney, Jah Wobble, The Crystal Method, Rollins Band, Hanson, Erasure, Robert Plant, Sepultura, Van Halen, and Yes, for the Owner of A Lonely Heart Video. Now that is subversive. There are even more curious entries to be found in his videography. (A partial list is to be found on Wikipedia.) We have lost one of the premier image makers in popular music, aged only 55. And he could make the electronics scream real good, too.

COIL – Windowpane
Uploaded by RileyELFuk. – Explore more music videos.

Windowpane by Coil.
The uploaded video is not of the best quality. I picked this track because it is one I used to play on my old radio show in the early 1990s. It was the white label promo 12 inch and it fit in nicely with the mix of acid house, industrial, post punk and American post-hardcore/grunge/what-have-you I would spin on Wednesday mornings on WRPI 91.5FM, Troy. WRPI’s record library contained (and still did, last I checked in 2009) an impressive collection of records by Throbbing Gristle and it’s various offspring. Windowpane also evokes some of the feel of Joy Division’s ‘New Dawn Fades’. It’s a more positive flip on that haunting melody.

Throbbing Gristle bandmates Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti have issued a statement on the band’s website.

Dave Simpson’s memorial post on the Guardian’s Music Blog.

Continue reading R.I.P. Peter Christopherson

Wow Cool

The World Did Not Get Enough Rammellzee

Watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker For Free Online

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

Art Clokey Was Born 90 Years Ago Today

R.I.P. Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Occupy Wall Street: The General Assembly

Call-To-Action: How Music Fans Can Show Support For Indie Labels Affected By The PIAS Warehouse Fire in London

Support Pegacorn Press on IndieGoGo

Books, Books, Books!

The Beauty of Urban Decay 2

The Center for PostNatural History on We Make Money Not Art

Keep Reading Frenzy Alive!

Quick Hits for a Thursday

Easy Wizards

Captain Beefheart – Best Batch Yet

R.I.P. Don Van Vliet – Captain Beefheart

Music Monday: Nuisance – Attractive Nuisance demo

Music Monday: Kill Your Pet Puppy

R.I.P. Peter Christopherson

A Thanksgiving Prayer by William S. Burroughs

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