Kind of rediscovered Wipers’ Youth of America recently after I found this video of them performing the title track live in 1983:
And so that brought me back to the album, which is great:
Released in 1981 at the peak of the early hardcore scene, when hardcore was positing itself as the “real” thing reacting against “normal” punk and new wave, Youth of America was a further reaction against that: six songs in 30 minutes rather than 30 songs in six minutes, and the title track clocks in over 10 minutes. It’s borderline prog by comparison with, say, Minor Threat or early Husker Du (whose Land Speed Record was even shorter but had 17 songs). Great stuff. I’ve seen Greg Sage characterised as a sort of punk Hendrix, which he demurs in interviews but I don’t think it’s entirely wrong.
The thing that puzzles me, though, is that when Sage reissued it in the Wipers box set, he switched the sides round. I don’t know why, and obviously it was his prerogative to do that, “When It’s Over” still makes a good album closer… it’s just that the title track makes a better one. It’s the sort of epic guitar burnout that feels like a natural final track for an album or a live set closer.
This one hurts. I know that, in his own way, Corman was as much of a production-line churn-’em’out factory as any of the actual Hollywood majors, and frankly the quality of the movies he oversaw was generally probably questionable at best, but so many people in the American film industry from the 60s onwards started out in the “Roger Corman Film School” that the face of Hollywood would’ve looked vastly different without him. I mean, some of those figures may have made it by themselves, but what if they didn’t? No Coppola, no Scorsese, no Jack Nicholson, no Ron Howard, no James Cameron, no Robert Towne, no James Horner… lots of Big Hollywood just never happens. So yeah, this is a sad one; Corman was just there for so long—in a bit over a week’s time it will, in fact, be 70 years since his first film (as producer), Monster From the Ocean Floor, came out—that, even though you knew he couldn’t last forever, it’s still a shock somehow. Still, no one will ever accuse him of not having lived his life to the fullest… this is Dark Corners Review’s look back at that life from about a year ago:
The Met Gala is a fashion event, and consequently I have next to no interest in it, because as a general rule I do not give a good goddamn about fashion so the Gala doesn’t attract me. Indeed, I don’t think I even knew anything about it before watching this video about it:
I wish JJ would come back to YT, cos her stuff was fun. Anyway, I am absolutely not a style icon by any stretch of the imagination; I am about basic black in everything—band t-shirts are about as colourful as I get and most of the ones I have are just white on black designs—and comfort above all, and if I don’t care about dressing up for myself, I generally don’t care too much about other people doing it.
Now, the Met Gala is a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume department—last year it cost seventy-five thousand dollars to attend, and even that was only if Anna Wintour invited you in the first place; it’s for a good enough cause, I suppose, but for fuck’s sake—and each year there’s a theme tied in with whatever the Costume Institute is exhibiting at the time. You don’t have to dress accordingly, but it’s expected that you will. Consequently, the Met Gala strikes me primarily as a load of absurdly well-off people dressing up stupidly in public, and I don’t really care that much…
The story can be read here, and revolves around an aging aristocrat and his wife, about to be beset by raging mobs. However, Count Axel has flowers in his garden that can turn back time a certain amount when they’re plucked and thereby he holds back the advance of said mobs. But nothing lasts forever, though. It’s a neat story with a really neat idea, but I suspect Jim Ballard would have found it an incomprehensible idea for a fashion theme as I do…
…And if I didn’t understand it, I’m not sure some of the attendees really did either… I mean, the story’s not about flowers as such, is it? But that seems to have been the easiest way to live up to the “Garden of Time” theme… I don’t know, I’m just perplexed by the very idea of any Ballard story becoming the basis for something like the Met Gala (parenthetically, People Online are outraged, obviously, that the event is happening at all while Israel is wiping out Palestine, but frankly, if we stopped doing everything like this while there’s an atrocity happening somewhere on Earth we’d stop doing anything at all), though I do rather like the idea that someone who’s never heard of Ballard before might now actually read something by him (“ooh, this one’s about cars, that sounds like fun…”). Could you imagine, though, if whoever decided on the theme for this year’s ball picked another Ballard story like Crash or The Unlimited Dream Company or The Atrocity Exhibition? I think even I might watch that…
Alas, the end times appear to have been a bit of a disappointment again, with no reports that I can see of people rising into the sky en masse or that mass human sacrifice someone was predicting, or the serial earthquakes the northeast US was supposed to get according to some others… I suppose we’ve still got a few days before the red heifer thing works out. Needless to say, though, the idiots have still been out in force online; on Youtube they’ve mostly manifested as astrologers, who I’m sure are harmless, but there was a ton of religious cranks (Muslim ones, not just Christians) who I’m a lot less sure of. And then there was this guy:
No reason not to use a common astronomical event to whip up a bit of Islamophobia, eh? Always the way with these far-right American pastors…
…Oh, he’s Australian? Fuck. Well, be honest, you would’ve expected him to be American too with the amount of bullshit his channel has about American politics. Though by that logic, you’d probably think I was American too or something… Anyway, Steve was born into “a family of Buddhists, Catholics, Methodists, and Muslims” and came away from it with the worst aspects of all of them, by the look of it. I’m sure him and Danny Nalliah would be great mates.
Still, this struck me as egregious even by comparison:
Um… no? I watched a bit of the video itself which is a lot more vague about things than this thumbnail for it might indicate, but I’m fairly sure that the fact that Crowley claimed to have started channelling Liber AL on April 8th 1904 and the fact that there was a solar eclipse on the same date 120 years years are entirely unrelated. I mean, Crowley himself attached so little importance to the book that he actually lost the manuscript for a few years, so I don’t think he would’ve attached any importance to the date coincidence either…
Anyway, the eclipse happened and people were excited, weather seems to have been good for most places, and I’ve seen a bunch of great photos of it online:
Ganked from the Graun, that was the view from Toronto. The Sun itself put on a good show before the Moon moved on; someone in the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm FB group posted this photo they got:
…And then noted that the solar prominence you can see at the bottom is the size of the Earth.
FUCK.
See, I find that sufficiently head-spinning without having to a bunch of religious bullshit about the end of the world and all that. (And what about the other countries that got to see the eclipse? Does God have a separate judgement for Mexico and Canada? What about all the other countries on Earth that saw nothing, are we off the hook?) The spectacle was more than enough, especially for some of the people I saw on YT having a moment together in news videos of it getting darker and darker. Celestial mechanics can be damned pretty to look at. And however cheesy it may be, I think the message of this song is basically correct and I fucking love it:
Now I think about it, though, I can imagine some dickhead might look at that and think “Apoptygma Berzerk… wait, Apop sounds like Apep, and APEP is the name of that rocket thing NASA was doing during the eclipse, and don’t they have an album called Rocket Science too? Apop… Apep… Stephan Groth is the Antichrist?!” If people can believe some of the shit I’ve seen lately, someone can believe that, I’m sure…
Anyway, so much for the apocalypse, I suppose. We’re due to get a total solar eclipse in 2028 that’ll actually be visible here in Sydney, so I suppose that’ll be something to get excited about, cos according to Wiki the last one we got here was in 1857 and the next one won’t be visible until 2858. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be around for that. Somehow I also suspect the weather on that day in 2028 will also be shit and no one will see anything…
I’m going through some old recordings of Rage to pick out music videos for the video collection, and the one I’m editing just now featured this here TV performance of “Fireball” by Deep Purple. Or should I say “performance”, cos whatever show this was done for clearly adhered to the common practice of bands miming (I think Gillan’s voice is the only actual live element). And there’s always been a sort of kayfabe thing about this, the audience knows what they’re listening to is playback but we never talk about that fact, but there have been some notable instances of miming musicians making it obvious…
…but I was particularly struck by this Deep Purple TV clip, cos near the end the camera captures R. Blackmore “playing” the back of his guitar. As being blatant about miming goes, this is kind of magnificent in its contempt. Paice doesn’t look like he’s putting in much effort on the drums either, but to be honest I can’t tell for sure and I may well be wrong; he’s certainly not as obvious as Blackmore if he is pretending…
This is one of the best things I’ve seen in ages. What makes it even funnier is that the people behind it seem to be actual Christians, too, albeit Christians with a clearly developed sense of irony about Christian culture.
For some reason “Vegetable Man” seems to have been my song of the night. So here we go, with the (rather belatedly) officially released version:
Alternately, a somewhat different mix from what I presume is an older bootleg source:
And the Jesus & Mary Chain cover:
Parenthetically, it was on account of this song that I spent the most money I ever paid for a seven-inch single… cos this was the B-side of J&MC’s first single “Upside Down” and they persistently refused to give it a CD release for years (not even on Barbed Wire Kisses), so when I found the single at Red Eye some time in the late 90s I bought it for this. Fifty dollars for a seven-incher. I think it finally came out on CD about ten years later.
Only just discovered this video exists (thank you, Youtube’s “new to you” tab, you delivered me both this and the new Aamon video tonight). I remember the first time I heard Bone Machine, it got to this song and I thought “oh how interesting, Tom Waits covered the Ramones”… and then for some reason I found myself looking at the credits in the CD booklet and discovered I’d got it completely the wrong way round. And yet I think I can be excused? After all, it is such a Ramones song that I still can’t fully believe they didn’t write it…
This is legitimately horrific. Aamon’s particular flavour of body horror has achieved new heights, or depths as the case may be. I’m not even sure that scrotum-neck Trump in the video thumbnail is even the worst thing here…
…but I was particularly struck by this Deep Purple TV clip, cos near the end the camera captures R. Blackmore “playing” the back of his guitar. As being blatant about miming goes, this is kind of magnificent in its contempt. Paice doesn’t look like he’s putting in much effort on the drums either, but to be honest I can’t tell for sure and I may well be wrong; he’s certainly not as obvious as Blackmore if he is pretending…