Bought Dr John’s debut album Gris-Gris at great expense after hearing John Peel play Walk On Gilded Splinters on the radio. Could have sworn it was late at night on his pirate radio show The Perfumed Garden, but that ended in the summer of 1967 a year before Gris-Gris was released. So much for memory.
It was impossible to make out more than a few of the lyrics amid Dr Rebennack’s lazy Southern drawl, and hard to make sense of even those. Thanks to the miracles of the internet, it’s now possible to find those lyrics in full. But even with them typed out on the page, the song’s not much easier to understand 44 years later…
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]
Whatever will the young people think of next? Just as planking gets denounced as lethally dangerous by Australian PM Julia Gillard, antipodean youth have already moved on to the more challenging – yet consider safer – pastime of hypotenusing. According to one of its many dedicated Facebook pages it’s: “the act of finding a vertical and horizontal surface that make a right angle in which you become the hypotenuse – a slant on the act of planking” . Click here for more pictures and instructions from the breakfast team on Sydney’s Triple J radio station.
