Hilarious but nonetheless scary footage of U.S. bikers en masse – shot in 1080p HD with a yearning, elegaic soundtrack by the curiously named Mary Cigarettes.
It wouldn’t sound out of place on a Joni Mitchell album and could just as easily easily come from 1986 or even 1968. Except that back then no male artist I can think of would have had the balls to write and sing lyrics as openly, sensuously queer as this – and no record company or radio station would have allowed us to hear them.
Click here for more videos from Mr Cigarettes and here for more of his music.
A few years ago Child A and I became intrigued by a monochrome canvas we saw at the Tate Modern gallery in London by the French artist Yves Klein.
The name meant nothing to me at the time, but according to c4gallery.com “he is generally considered the progenitor of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. In Klein’s short life he singlehandedly managed to redefine the foundation on which the entire generation of the 1960s avant-garde stood…” [read full article here ]
In 1958 he developed his trademark, patented, colour International Klein Blue which he claimed had a quality “close to pure space – a Blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification”. Conveniently for dealers in fine art, the colour allegedly lies outside the gamut of computer displays, and can therefore not be accurately portrayed on webpages. That said, international-klein-blue.com gives it a shot anyway. View the page in fullscreen mode on your browser and you’ve got yourself a DIY 20th Century modernist masterpiece right there on your desktop.
According to Tate Modern Klein made around 200 untitled monochrome paintings using IKB and, after his early death at the age of 34, his widow assigned a number to each of them. The one my son and I saw was IKB 79 painted in 1959. [More]
Used to listen to Still Crazy in the mid seventies late at night in my room on repeat – Paul Simon at his most sublime and melancholy. Thinking about it after actually meeting my old lover on the street last night. Sure enough we talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some beers too. Still crazy ? Probably. But alive – a lot of our other friends from GLF London of 1974 didn’t make it.
To tell you the truth he was there with me when I came a cropper on the street yesterday. Only then did he admit he’d just taken a tumble himself an hour earlier – measured his length down a flight of hotel stairs in Kings Cross. Thankfully he escaped pretty much unscathed. After a fifteen minute lie-down to get over the shock he’d been fine.
Listening to Still Crazy After All These Years three and a half decades later the daft thing is how young we actually all still were. Along with Neil Young, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell etc Rhymin’ Simon provided a soundtrack for our generation to mourn the passing of our youth even while we still had it. “Time, time, time see what’s become of me” he wrote on Hazy Shade Of Winter at the age of – what – 26 or 27.
What we should have said to ourselves at that age was: this is the youngest you’re ever going to be for the rest of your life – better make the most of it. Bit then of course exactly the same thing applies now.
