Here’s an outstanding specimen of Black Flag as a galvanizing live act. This was one of Black Flag’s strongest lineups, Greg/Henry/Kira and Descendents stalwart Bill Stevenson on the drums.

This was recorded on August 26, 1984, at the Stone in San Francisco for the explicit purpose of making an official SST live album and video. The album came out—its title was Live ‘84—but the VHS release never happened. The Jettisoundz VHS release known simply as Black Flag is not the same show, that set was recorded in Bradford in the UK a few months earlier.

Black Flag start the show with an 8-minute-plus version of “The Process Of Weeding Out” that (even though it sounds good) had me in the mind of making a Spinal Tap “jazz odyssey” joke, but wouldn’t you know, the next three songs are “Nervous Breakdown,” “I Can’t Decide,” and “Slip It In” and the unmistakable Black Flag fury is fully present and accounted for. Kira is in excellent form during this entire set.
 

Setlist:
The Process Of Weeding Out
Nervous Breakdown
I Can’t Decide
Slip It in
My Ghetto
Black Coffee
I Won’t Stick Any of You Unless and Until I Can Stick All of You!
Forever Time
Six Pack
My War
Jealous Again
I Love You
Swinging Man
Three Nights
Nothing Left Inside
Fix Me
Wound up
Rats Eyes
The Bars

 
In 1982, the writer Primo Levi returned to Auschwitz concentration camp. It was forty years since he had been imprisoned there. His journey was filmed for a documentary for Italian television.

Levi had been captured as a resistance fighter in Italy. At first, he was sent to an Italian concentration camp at Fossoli. When this was taken over by the Nazis, Levi was transported by cattle truck to Monowitz—one of the three main camps at Auschwitz—on February 21st, 1944.

Levi had thought they were being transported to Austerlitz. No one had ever heard of Auschwitz. Six-hundred -and-fifty Italian Jews were transported. Forty-five people crammed into each sealed train carriage for five days without food or water.

I remember that our breath would freeze on the car bolts and we would compete in scraping off the frost, full of rust as it was, to have a few drops with which to wet our lips.

Levi was imprisoned in Auschwitz for eleven months until the camp was liberated by the Russian army in January 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews transported to the camp only twenty survived.

In his book Survival in Auschwitz (aka If This Be A Man), Levi wrote of the way he and other prisoners attempted to “adapt”—the man who hummed Mozart; the slave laborer who juggled stones; the prisoner who said he had got the better of Hitler just by being alive.

But adapting was never easy. Even the most trivial of things made it difficult to survive. Shoes, for example. Mismatched pairs would be thrown at the prisoner—one with a heel, one without, one too small, one too big—which made walking impossible. These shoes caused infections—sores that never healed. The prisoners with swollen or infected feet were sent to the infirmary. But as “swollen feet” was not a recognized disease—these men and women were sent to the gas chamber.

In total 1.1 million humans were killed at Auschwitz—90% were Jewish.

One in six of all Jewish people killed during the Holocaust (Shoah) died at Auschwitz.

The ones who adapted to everything are the ones who survived. But the majority did not adapt and died.

Watch Primo Levi’s return to Auschwitz, after the jump…

 
We have not yet reached full-on buyer’s remorse on the election of Donald Trump to be our nation’s president, but we’re getting there at a rapid pace. Not everybody regrets voting for Trump, to be sure, but he’s the first president to have an approval rating south of 50% after the election since we’ve been measuring that kind of thing, and I think we all know that Trump doesn’t have the kind of personality that’s going to thrive under the peculiar pressures that the presidency affords.

Which doesn’t mean that he’s been unable to use the same Trump distortion vortex that has served him so spectacularly well for the last year and a half, because it hasn’t failed him yet. Yet.

Still, there have been no shortage of episodes demonstrating Trump’s manifest unfitness for office. His meeting with the news media before Thanksgiving surely was one of the more striking examples of this. The network reporters in attendance expected the meeting to be about “the access they would get to the Trump administration,” but they underestimated the shallow form of vanity that constitutes the primary personality trait of one Donald J. Trump.

As the New Yorker reported, “Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use ‘nicer’ pictures?” Even worse, a participant at the meeting observed that our president-elect “truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment. He doesn’t. He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.”

Awwwww. Poor little Trump doesn’t get that a free and unfettered media is permitted to write what they please about him. The citizenry at large. of course, is also armed with similar freedoms…

When Trump threw down the gauntlet on angrily demanding that media and media consumers alike conspire to pretend that he does not have an unsightly double chin, the Internet responded. Boy, did it respond, with hastily slapped together Photoshopped montages that (when taken in all at once) somehow reveal something about the true nature of our future president. Everything from Jabba the Hutt (so. many. Jabba. the. Hutt. references.) to Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote became fair game for the legions of self-appointed “First Amendment People.” Here are some of the best results:
 

 

 

 
Tons more after the jump…....

 
Venezuelan artist Luigi Rodriguez claims he has always been intrigued by orgasms. So he decided to study his own. The result is an unflinching hyperrealistic sculpture of his own face during orgasm—which he calls “Pure Luigi” or We Come As We Are.

Based in Madrid, Rodriguez spent most of this year learning the necessary skills to create his orgasmic self-portrait. He wanted “the finished artwork to be as close to real life as possible, so it was completely honest.”

It was a challenging and difficult process which Rodriguez admits took him outside of his comfort zone—putting himself in a highly “vulnerable state.” This exploration led Rodriguez to the conclusion that at the point of orgasm “we lose ourselves in the moment, removing all layers of fear, judgment and ego, revealing a face that represents who we are in the most pure state.”

“Pure Luigi” is certainly a powerful work of art. Rodriguez is keen to collaborate with others on further hyperrealistic sculptures—so, if you’re interested you can contact him here.
 

 
More of Rodriguez’s orgasmic self-portrait plus a video of him at work, after the jump…
 

via Alice Cooper eChive
 
“PUT DOWN those needles and quaaludes, kiddo, and pick up the jug!” So CREEM urged juvenile readers in its June 1973 cover story “Alice Cooper’s Alcohol Cookbook and Timetable for World Conquest.” Today, with our nation blighted by opiate and meth abuse, and our citizens poor in cash but rich in reasons for seeking oblivion, we have to ask: did CREEM have the right prescription?

It wasn’t the best advice to give the nation’s teens; after all, liquor is one of those drugs that can cause people to drop dead, or otherwise fuck up their lives beyond repair. It might even be worse than heroin and crack. (And me with a cupboard full of sauce, but nary a grain of H or C!)

But, you know. What am I, your doctor? I don’t know how anyone reads the morning news without a stiff belt of something or other. Besides, nobody ever looked to America’s most bibulous band for health tips. By ‘73, the late, great Glen Buxton, who contributed four recipes to this cookbook, had already been hospitalized for pancreatitis and forbidden to drink ever again—not the most seductive advertisement for a cold glass of Buxton’s Bomber.

The pages below contain 23 recipes (22 drinks and one hangover remedy) which I have faithfully transcribed. The “Timetable for World Conquest” part of the CREEM feature is available at the Alice Cooper eChive.
 

via Alice Cooper eChive
 

ALICE COOPER

Pinacolada a la Cooper (for six)
10 ounces dark (151 proof) rum
1/6 fresh pineapple, chipped into sections
16 ounces fresh coconut milk
Pour the rum into a bowl. Soak the pineapple into the rum. Pour into blender, adding two more ounces rum. Add coconut milk, then two ounces fresh pineapple juice and one tray ice. Blend until you freeze it. Garnish with pineapple wedge and cherry.

***

Velvet Hammer
1 ounce gin
1 ounce apricot brandy
1 ounce dry vermouth
1 dash Maraschino liqueur
1 dash orange bitters
Stir with ice. Strain into standard cocktail glass.

***

Royal Setup (for preconcert)
2 ounces Crown Royal
8 ounces coke
1 ice cube
Drink until you feel prepared to face 20,000 screaming teenage maniacs.

More drink recipes from Alice Cooper, after the jump…

 
Man, who knew rock ‘n’ roll was so posh? Earlier this week, we alerted you to the sale of Dennis Hopper’s extremely modest record collection for only about 1500 times its probable value. This is unrelated, but it feels like a part of the same stupidity: an awning from CBGB, the Bowery dive bar that in the ‘70s became the Ur venue for the musical insurgency that would come to be known as punk rock, is being auctioned by the elite house Sotheby’s, and is estimated to fetch between $25,000 and $35,000.

The club was never really home base for people who could afford that kind of cash outlay for an outsized souvenir—the bands that played there were decidedly low-rent. The bands that made the place a Mecca included the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Blonde, Talking Heads, the Cramps, and the Dead Boys (who recorded their live album Night of the Living Dead Boys there), well before they became marquee names. After a long and legendary run, the club closed ten years ago, and was “resurrected” in name only as we shit you not a restaurant in the Newark Airport (one and a half stars on Yelp). That restaurant has a small-scale replica of the club’s iconic awning. One of the several actual awnings that adorned the club’s doorway over the years lives on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but while the Sotheby’s web site claims that the awning for sale is the original, Time Out New York says that’s incorrect:

Though the venerable auction house is listing the item as the “original awning for punk mecca CBGB,” that’s not actually the case. It’s a version rescued from the trash in 2004 by former club manager Drew Bushong. Bushong’s find was one several iterations of the iconic sign, beginning with the first one hand-painted by CBGB owner Hilly Kristal. That awning is believed to have been stolen one night in the 1980s by the band Jody Foster’s Army (JFA), after the group played a gig. It’s whereabouts remain unknown.

Yeah, that’s fucking hilarious. I didn’t realize I could love JFA more!

The auction is scheduled for Saturday, December 10th. I’m sincerely hoping some CBGB O.G. gets it, but it will probably get sold to a fuckin’ pharma bro.

More after the jump…

 
Prior to his death in 1963, Jean Cocteau, the great French artist, filmmaker, novelist, playwright and poet, made his cinematic last will and testament, a time-capsule titled Jean Cocteau s’adresse… à l’an 2000 (“Jean Cocteau speaks to the year 2000”). Cocteau, seen seated in front of his own work at Francine Weisweiller’s Villa Santo-Sospir (where his Testament of Orpheus was shot), offers advice and perspective to a generation just being born. Cocteau gives his definition of genius and of the poet, “an intermediary, a medium of that mysterious force that inhabits.” He also discusses the technical progress of science and how it must not be impeded by intolerance and religion.

In his Cocteau biography James S. Williams wrote:

Just a couple of months before his death, in August 1963, he made one last film: a 25-minute short entitled Jean Cocteau s’adresse à l’an 2000 (Cocteau addresses the year 2000). The film comprises one still and highly sober shot of Cocteau facing the camera head-on to address the youth of the future. Once recorded, this spoken message for the 21st century was wrapped up, sealed and posted on the understanding that it would be opened only in the year 2000 (as it turned out, it was discovered and exhumed a few years shy of that date). If in The Testament Cocteau portrays himself as a living anachronism, a lonesome classical modernist loitering in space-time in the same buckskin jacket and tie while lost in the spectral light of his memories, here he acknowledges explicitly the irony of his phantom-like state: by the time the viewer sees this image, he, J. C., our saviour Poet, will long be dead.

Temporality is typically skewed: speaking from both 1963 and 2000 Cocteau is at once nostalgic for the present that will have passed and prophetic about the future. There is thus both a documentary aspect and projective thrust to the film, another new configuration of ‘superior realism’ and fantasy enhanced by Cocteau’s seamless performance as himself and his now ‘immortal’ status as a member of the Académie Française. He reiterates some of his long-standing artistic themes and principles: death is a form of life; poetry is beyond time and a kind of superior mathematics; we are all a procession of others who inhabit us; errors are the true expression of an individual, and so on. The tone is at once speculative and uncompromising, as when Cocteau pours vitriolic scorn on the many awards bestowed upon him, which he calls ‘transcendent punishments’. He also revels in the fact that he can say now what he likes with absolute freedom and impunity since he will not be around to suffer the consequences.

The status of Jean Cocteau s’adresse à l’an 2000 remains ultimately unclear. Is it a new testament or confession, or a heroic demonstration of the need for human endurance, or a pure ‘farce of anti-gravitation’ as he puts it? Or everything at once? It is entirely characteristic of Cocteau to leave us hanging on this suspended paradox. What is certain, however, and what we have consistently seen, is that Cocteau’s life and body are his work, and his work in turn is always mysteriously alive. This is Cocteau’s final gift to his fellow human beings. Let us retain and celebrate the force of that gesture. He is resurrected before our eyes, ever-present, defiant and joyfully queer.

Jean Cocteau is dead, long live Cocteau!

If you are a Cocteau aficionado, the film is a delight. Here are a few transcribed moments:

We remain apprentice robots.

I certainly hope that you have not become robots but on the contrary that you have become very humanized: that’s my hope.

But I have no idea who you are or how you are thinking, or what you are doing. I don’t know the dances you are dancing.

The dance of our time is called “The Twist.” Maybe you have heard
about it.

You most certainly have your own dance.

I wonder what Cocteau would have made of The Beatles, hippies, gay liberation, punk, Internet pornography, Facebook, the iPhone, Barack Obama and now Donald Trump, but this we’ll never know.

More after the jump…

 
It wasn’t for nothing that the old parish priest used to warn us off demon ventriloquism. He knew those painted wooden puppets were evil little fuckers. You see, at school we’d all seen the ad for a book of “voice throwing courses” in the comics we shared round the yard. I dreamt of sending off any spare cash for a copy of this prized guide. Alas the ad wanted dollars and I was living in McButthurt, Scotland, where dollars were as rare as virgin births. Mind you, having said that, there was a girl in high school who used that excuse for her trouble. “It must be the second coming, Father.” “Ye mean ye did it twice? Ye filthy little….”

Sadly, no dollars. But maybe that was a good thing—for the old priest with the whisky breath said ventriloquism was a “dabbling in the occult” kinda thing—involving ne’er-do-wells gathering in a graveyard to communicate with the dead. When a voice projected from the stomach—he claimed—this was “yer actual dead speaking to ye.”

I nixed the plan for the voice projection book and signed-up for a visit to the local cemetery to speak with the dead. Unfortunately, when I tried, all I ever heard was gas and the rumble of a ravenous tummy.

It’s probably that once upon-a-time, long, long ago tenuous connection with the occult and all things strange that makes ventriloquist dolls seem so creepy. They exude evil. They exude menace. You know as soon as you turn your back they’re up to no fucking good. Just ask Candice Bergen. She knows. She grew up in a home with Charlie McCarthy—the evil-looking ventriloquist doll that her father Edgar Bergen made famous. When Candice was growing up, Charlie always had the bigger bedroom. When Daddy wanted to spend quality time with Candice he often give her a:

...gentle squeeze on the back of my neck [which] was my cue to open and shut my mouth so he could ventriloquize me. Charlie and I would chatter together silently, while behind us Dad would supply the snappy repartee for both of us.

When Daddy Bergen died he left Charlie $10,000. Candice? Candice got zip.

So you see, all those movies (Dead of Night, Magic) and episodes of The Twilight Zone are actually all true—ventriloquism is waaaaaay baaaaad juju—which is kinda evidenced by this short selection of various ventriloquists and their devil dolls.
 

Leatherface as a child?
 

Jules Vernon as a young ventriloquist with his extended family.
 

Jules Vernon in old age. He went blind one Christmas during his stage act in 1920 but continued on until his death in 1937.
 
More creepy woodentops, after the jump…

“The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”
—J.G. Ballard

The three bedroom semi detached property that British novelist, short story writer, and essayist J.G Ballard lived in between 1960 and his death in 2009 is for sale. Listed by Daniel Wallin of Shepperton Estate Agents, the residence at Old Charlton Road in Central Shepperton is being offered for £475,000, a relative bargain in the commuter town:

Located on one of Shepperton’s most popular roads, just a short walk from the High Street, all local schools and the train station which offers direct services into London in just 50mins. Between 1960 and 2009 the property was owned by the writer J.G. Ballard, author of novels such as Empire of the Sun, Crash and High Rise - and Shepperton’s most famous resident. The home retains all of its original features but has also undergone some necessary but sympathetic updating with complete rewiring, the addition of central heating and solid oak parquet flooring throughout the ground floor. Three bedrooms, separate dining room, separate lounge, generous rear garden and a driveway. The entrance hall is of a proportionately generous size giving a welcome feel and space.

When Ballard’s first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, was published in January 1962, tired of traveling from Surrey into London (and back) every day, he resigned from his job at as the assistant editor of Chemistry and Industry magazine, and from then on supported himself and his family as a fulltime writer. After Ballard’s wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia in 1964, the father of post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction raised their three children – James, Fay and Bea– by himself in the home.

Ironically the very most Ballardian thing ever, isn’t really even remotely Ballardian itself. Except for the car crashes on the M3, of course. You can still hear them from the garden.
 

 

Ballard with his children Fay, Jim and Bea at their Shepperton home in 1965
 

 
More photos of the home after the jump…

The front cover of ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap & Other Dine-O-Mite Songs.’ An incredibly rare Australian promotional songbook that came inside of AC/DC’s 1976 record, ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.’
 
Also known as Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap & Other Dine-O-Mite Songs this incredibly rare piece of AC/DC ephemera was put out by the legendary Albert Productions—Australia’s very first indie record label that got its start back in 1964 under the guidance of music maverick Ted Albert. When the mid-70’s rolled around Albert Productions pretty much ruled the Australian music industry, thanks much in part to the wild success of the bad boys from Sydney. Here’s Angus Young on how the band’s relationship with Albert’s helped AC/DC thrive during their formative years from the 2010 book that details the history behind Albert’s House of Hits: 

When we first went out there, we were lucky enough to get a deal with Alberts’ even before we left Australia, so that was good for us. We didn’t have to go shopping ourselves, but what was good was that Ted [Albert]  advanced us a lot of the money so as we could get out there and tour and back-up the records. For him it was a long-term investment, but it paid in the end. It all helped.

According to the AC/DC Fan site, in Australia when you purchased the band’s 1976 release Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap it came along with a mailer that when sent to Albert and co. accompanied by three dollars, got you a copy of the book in the mail. It’s unclear how many of the books were made but when the do appear for sale online they sell for anywhere from $800 to a cool grand depending on the condition they are in. AC/DC put out other equally rare song-style books like The Rocka Souvenir Songbook and The Explosive Hits ‘76 Songbook around the same time but neither of them come even close to the wow-factor Dirty Deeds achieves.

I’ve included images from the book that include an amusing “AC/DC KWIZ” that I’m pretty sure is impossible to fail, an advice column called “Dear Aunt Haggis…” and a page for collecting the band’s autographs if you ever got close enough to them with a pen. The last layer of cool I will lay on you is the good news that back in 2014 a massive box set homaging Albert Productions was released called Good Times: Celebrating 50 Years Of Albert Productions. The set contains 102 different tracks from over the course fifty years from AC/DC and other notable Aussie bands like the Easybeats, long-running hard rockers Rose Tattoo and garageband favorites The Missing Links, just to name a few. Devil horns OUT!
 

The back cover of ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap & Other Dine-O-Mite Songs.’
 

Table of contents.
 

‘Dirty Deeds comic’ and autograph page.
 
More after the jump…