Revel in New York
A look at the city through its people
Music
Al Capone's Guns Don't Argue
A few other songs that mention Al Capone
Wesley Willis - Al Capone
Rancid - Young Al Capone
The Specials - Gangsters
Run DMC w/ Living Colour - Me, Myself and My Microphone
Anita Pallenberg and a Few Random, but Related Stories
Anita Pallenberg is a model, actress and fashion designer who was romantically linked to Keith Richards from 1967 to 1979.
While living in New York, she was involved with the Living Theater, starring in the legendary play Paradise Now. She rolled with Warhol and The Factory. She started dating Brian Jones but left him for Keith Richards, and there's rumors that she had an affair with Mick Jagger during the filming of Performance.
She played a major role in the development and presentation of The Stones, so much so that Jagger had the songs of his Beggars Banquet album remixed when Pallenberg criticized them.
She had a heavy interest in the occult and it was said by Tony Sanchez (Richard's drug dealer) that:
"She was obsessed with black magic and began to carry a string of garlic with her everywhere — even to bed—to ward off vampires. She also had a strange mysterious old shaker for holy water which she used for some of her rituals. Her ceremonies became increasingly secret, and she warned me never to interrupt her when she was working on a spell"
Pallenberg shared Richard's drug addiction and a warrant for her arrest was what led cops to Keith Richard's hotel room in Toronto where he was arrested for heroin.
She has acted in over a dozen films including Nic Roeg's Performance, Vadim's Barbarella, Marco Ferarri's Dillinger is Dead, and Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely.
In an interview with UK's Independent, Harmony Korine explains how the two met:
"I met Anita almost a decade ago. I was in London and I was with this girl who'd gotten mugged. I was running after the guy who stole her purse. I didn't know the neighbourhood, and he got away. Then I lost the girl, too, 'cause I'd been running for so long. I didn't know where I was. I stopped to smoke a cigarette, but I didn't have a light and then I saw a lady who was dressed very chic. She was gardening and smoking. She had a beautiful scarf, and she was down there with a trowel, and this cigarette hanging out. I walked up to her and said, "Excuse me". She turned around and it was Anita Pallenberg! But, before I recognised her, I knew there was something special about this lady. We ended up talking and exchanged phone numbers. I knew Anita's son, Marlon, from New York. Marlon is very discreet, but I knew he had pretty heavy-duty parents [his father is Keith Richards]. And on my first trip to London, people had said I should meet Anita. What's so strange is that we met in this accidental way.
I didn't think of putting her in a movie at that point – I didn't have a movie at that point. I was a little bit messed up in the head. It wasn't until a few years later that we started talking about films.
Anita is the queen of rock'n'roll, like the female Chuck Berry. I thought it would be great to put her in a film. I like to start out as friends and turn it into work, rather than the other way around. It's nice for me to have a relationship that pre-dates the filming. Then, when you start working, you're already connected. If you look at the credits of my movies – my brother, my father, my wife and a lot of my friends are there. There's a greater trust and those people tend to give that much more. Anita is like part of my family. She and Rachel, my wife, sometimes knit together.
She lives by her own rules. Sometimes I'll just sit back and watch her. Anita is very punk-rock. When I went to her house for the first time, she was blaring Beethoven on one speaker and the Wailers on the other. And I was like, "What the fuck is this music? I've never heard such a combo!" She was playing both because she couldn't decide which to put on.
Recently Rachel and I went over to her house and Anita showed us some of her Super 8 home movies, with Keith and the Stones from the late Sixties. That was amazing. To her, it was just home movies, but to me and my wife, it was: "Wow!" Anita is very glamorous. "
To Continue the story click here.
Another interesting story and photo essay posted by The Selvedge Yard takes on the story of Pallenberg, Gram Parsons, Keith Richards, and a summer spent in exile in South of France.
"In the summer of ‘71, The Rolling Stones, seeking shelter from their UK tax woes, exiled to the South of France. Keith Richards set up house with Anita Pallenberg and their son Marlon in Villa Nellcôte– a 16 room waterfront mansion that once served as Gestapo headquarters for the Nazis during WWII. The infamy continued with it now best remembered among rock fans as the grand flop-house where Exile On Main Street was recorded.
French photographer Dominique Tarle chronicled perhaps the most notorious house party ever, and had full access to goings-on over a period of six crazy months. He later recounted to the New York Times– ”They built a studio in the basement of Keith’s house because the band knew it would be easiest for Keith,” says Dominique Tarlé, who had an all-access pass inside the villa for six months. “Engineers and technicians slept over, illegal power lines from the French railway system juiced their instruments, and when the temperature hit 100, they rehearsed with their pants off. A carnival of characters paraded through– Terry Southern, Gram Parsons, John Lennon, even a tribal band from Bengal… dope dealers from Marseille; petty thieves, who stole most of the drugs and half the furniture; and hangers-on, all of them there to witness what was happening.”
To continue this story visit The Selvedge Yard
Basic Channel - The Purest of the Pure
The record sleeves for Basic Channel and their various output have always had a nice aesthetic. Simple, sleek and elegant. It doesn't hurt that the music is killer as well.
I own the helmet below, which I like to wear when listening to these records. For no reason other than it just feels right.
Basic Channel is a dub techno production team and record label, composed of Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, that originated in Berlin, Germany in 1993. The duo released a number of vinyl-only tracks under various aliases, each of which employed their signature brand of dissonant dub techno. The nine original releases were each primarily identified as Basic Channel productions by their catalogue numbers, as the Basic Channel logo on the label became more distorted and unreadable with each subsequent release.
The duo set up a studio in Berlin on Paul-Lincke-Ufer, in a building which was eventually to house Mark Ernestus’ distributing company and shop Hard Wax, and the label's mastering studio Dubplates & Mastering, set up to ensure a desired dynamic quality for the vinyl.
The Basic Channel imprint ceased business in 1995 (apart from two releases almost a decade later that were originally issued on Carl Craig's Planet E label), but were followed by a string of similar labels. Among the most important were Chain Reaction, which released non-Von Oswald/Ernestus productions and helped launch the careers of dub-influenced minimal techno producers such as Monolake and Porter Ricks; Basic Replay, which specialises in reggae and dancehall re-issues; Main Street, for house-related releases; and Burial Mix and Rhythm & Sound, which saw the duo's sound move away from the Detroit blueprint and closer to vocal-lead dub and reggae. Their With The Artists album, released as Rhythm & Sound and featuring celebrated reggae and dancehall vocalists such as Sugar Minott, featured in the top 50 records of the year for 2003 in The Wire magazine.
Basic Channel also run a comprehensive programme of re-issues for the American reggae label Wackies.
Behind the doors of 98 Bowery
98 Bowery is the web project of Marc Miller and the best way to tell you about what he does is to let him say it. Below is Marc's mission statement and an assortment of images that can be found on his amazing site.
Telling stories with pictures, with ephemera and with a few carefully chosen words is what I enjoy doing best. Over the years I have been lucky to create many visual narratives during a varied career as an artist, journalist, curator, art historian and publisher. "View from the Top Floor" brings together some of these stories in a chronicle of my life and the creative world I experienced during the twenty years I lived in the top floor loft at 98 Bowery.
The Bowery from 1969 to 1989 was a low-rent refuge for artists and free spirits willing to tolerate the alcoholics and homeless men who lived on the street. These pages show this vie de bohème as remembered through pictures accumulated at the time. "View from the Top Floor" has no hard and fast rules. It is autobiography and art history. It is a stage for my friends and me. While it does not strive to be complete or objective, it unavoidably takes its place in the bigger world, tracking in part the greater story of art and music in the 1970s and 1980s, an era when culture strove to be more real and expressive, and the East Village and Lower East Side emerged as one of the world's most potent creative centers.
- Marc H. Miller
Best Albums of 2009
(in no order)
1. The Broadcast & The Focus Group
Broadcast & The Focus Group | Birmingham UK | Warp | Listen
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2. Om
Om - God is Good | San Francicso | Drag City | Listen (An album Goblin could have made)
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3. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart | Brooklyn | Slumberland | Listen
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4. Telepathe
Telepathe | Brooklyn | IamSound | Listen
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4. Cold Cave
Cold Cave | Philadelphia | Matador | Listen
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5. Nite Jewel
Nite Jewel | Los Angeles | Self Released w/ Human Ear | Listen
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6. Here We Go Magic
Here We Go Magic | Brooklyn | Secretly Canadian | Listen
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7. Kill For Total Peace
Kill For Total Peace | Paris | Pan European Recordings | Listen
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8. Moon Duo
Moon Duo | San Francisco | Sacred Bones | Listen
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9. Animal Collective
Animal Collective | Brooklyn, Lisbon, DC | Domino | Listen
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10. A Place To Bury Strangers
A Place to Bury Strangers | Brooklyn | Mute | Listen
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11. Pure Ecstasy
Pure Ecstasy | Austin | | Light Lodge | Listen
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12. Omar S
Omar S | Detroit | fxhe | Listen
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13. Martyn
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Best Reissues
1. Space
Space | Marseille | Nang | Listen
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2. Comet Gain
Comet Gain | London | Whats Your Rupture | Listen
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3. Prince Lasha
Prince Lasha Ensemble | Oakland | Dusty Groove | Sorry folk no gimmes here
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4. The Feelies
The Feelies | New Jersey | Bar None | Listen
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5. The 39 Clocks
39 Clocks | Germany | Bureau B | Listen
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6. Peter Walker
Peter Walker | Boston | Tompkins Square | Listen
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8. Bill Fox
Bill Fox | Cleveland | Scat | Listen
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9. Guru Guru
Guru Guru | Germany | Brain | Listen
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10. The Axemen
The Axemen | Aukland | Siltbreeze | Listen
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11. The Liverpool Scene
The Liverpool Scene | Liverpool | Esoteric | Listen
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12. The East Flatbush Project
The East Flatbush Project | Brooklyn | 10/30 Uproar | Listen
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13. J.T. IV
J.T. IV | Chicago | Drag City |
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14. Sperm
Sperm | Finland | Destijl | No Songs or video but excellent is understatement
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15. Margo Guryan
Margo Guryan | Los Angeles | Oglio | Listen
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16. Das Ding
Das Ding | Dutch | Minimal Wave | Listen
Bixobal Magazine | Publish More Issues Please
Bixobal is magazine published by Ri Be Xibalba. They've published 5 issues. They need to publish more. Notable Stories have included:
The No-Neck Blues Band's Dave Nuss recalls his time with The Source Family which led to the first Yahowa 13 performance in New York City and their new LP. As much about Dave's experiences throughout this and how it brought him into the Family, as about discovering the wealth of their archives and continuing energy.
Akio Suzuki's diary from the 2006 Resonant Spaces tour in the UK during June 2006 as translated and introduced by Alan Cummings.
The Infinite Horizons of Stomu Yamash'ta by Gregor Meyer - a massive overview of the life and work of avant garde percussionist Stomu Yamash'ta, including his first English-language interview in over 30 years. A child prodigy, his meteoric rise in the Classical world spawned a new world of improvisation and Avant Classical in the late '60s and early '70s before melding Eastern concepts with Jazz Fusion via his more well known outfits Come to the Edge, East Wind, and Go. Includes never-before-revealed insight into collaborations with Toru Takemitsu, Takehisa Kosugi, Masahiko Sato, the Baschet brothers, and others. Years in the making, this exhaustive survey corrects misinformation and apocrypha carried down for decades, and opens a new window to Yamash'ta's current projects featuring instruments made from resonant stones. Includes an complete discography of his official releases.
an incredibly fun discussion with Peter Stampfel, founding member of the Holy Modal Rounders, about Harry Smith, the Fugs, Santeria, amphetamines, god, coincidence, music and much more. conducted by Allan MacInnis, this 19 page feature includes an illustration by Peter's daughter Zoe, plus a supplemental 3 page interview with Antonia Stampfel
an interview with Gerd Kraus on the legendary Krautrock bands Limbus 3 and Limbus 4 and the heady times that they grew out of
Jesse Paul Miller on his habit of collecting "bad" records
book dealer and artist Dave Hornor gives us the run down on books by Tuli Kupferburg of The Fugs
Boston Tea Party Posters
Sixties Posters has assembled the largest collection of Boston Tea Party posters I've seen anywhere and the best part is that you can bid on them. You'll need deep pockets though.
The Boston Tea Party was a concert venue located on 53 Berkeley Street in Boston, Massachusetts.
Originally the site of a synagogue, and then a street mission, the location was later converted into a venue that showed underground films, before being bought by Ray Riepen and David Hahn and converted again into a concert venue. It opened as a rock music hall on January 20, 1967.
The venue became associated with the psychedelic movement, being similar in this way to other contemporary rock halls such as New York's Fillmore East and Electric Circus, San Francisco's Fillmore West, and Philadelphia's Electric Factory.
The early history of this venue is documented in the book Mansion on the Hill by Fred Goodman.
Wikipedia
You might also like: Stereolab Album Covers & The Mystery of Hotcha! | Alan Aldridge | Barney Bubbles | Milton Glaser | Vintage Book Covers | Sister Corita | Anonima Group
Brooklyn Underground Film | Jake Magher's Energy Music
Trailer to Jake Magher's new film, Energy Music. Jake is the Dark Lord of the Greenpoint loft-film scene, which now moved to Bushwick. It's basically like the New York Free Jazz scene in the 60's, only freak-outs are done with celluloid instead a saxophones. If this film is half as good as his last three, it'll be bloody beautiful.
Check Out The Orange Drugs
Orange Drugs is 80's skate punk image blog that's just starting to get its groove but looks incredibly promising.
[Via] Reference Library
You may also like: Skate Witches | Old School Skate Stickers | Bones Brigade Videos | Nostalgia on Wheels
While the majority of this site showcases the cultural interests of our video subjects, the Blog is our chance to present some of the things we find interesting.
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