Tanuki are Japanese racoon dogs. Mischievous looking critters with a dog-like face and the body of a racoon. In ancient Japanese folklore these mammals were viewed as either gods of nature or troublesome yōkai. From the twelfth century on, tanuki were seen as humorous characters on account of their rather large testicles which artists grossly exaggerated for comic effect.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) was one of the last great masters of the ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings. He was famous for his pictures of samurai, animals and mythical creatures. He also created a sideline series of comic pictures depicting tanuki and their giant space hopper-sized gonads.
 

An ever-expanding nut sack will help you catch fish.
 

Stay dry in the heaviest of downpours with your scrot-umbrella.
 

Catch birds in flight with one toss of your ‘tanuki’ scrotum.
 
More racoon dogs and their monstrous testicles, after the jump…

 
In 1985 a German photographer named Peter Braatz traveled to North Carolina and ended up filming a good deal of behind-the-scenes footage of the making of one of the best movies of the 1980s, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Diverging from what most people would have done, I’d say, Braatz declined to make a regular documentary and opted instead to make a free-standing work of art called “No Frank in Lumberton”—we wrote about it a while back.

In late 2015, as part of its “Made To Measure” series, Brussels-based label Crammed Discs put out an “original soundtrack” composed by Tuxedomoon and Cult With No Name for the documentary Blue Velvet Revisited, a more recent reworking that Braatz forged from his original footage. In 2013 and 2014 Braatz came to realize that the contributions of Cult With No Name and Tuxedomoon would complement his images perfectly—in short order an agreement was made for the two groups to create a “joint soundtrack.”

Of the collaboration, Braatz commented:
 

In July 2013 I first heard the album ‘Above as Below’ by Cult With No Name. As the song ‘As Below’ came on I immediately had the idea to use it for my ‘Blue Velvet Revisited’ project, and to edit a trailer to the track that would showcase my footage.

...

I was keen to hand over the making of the soundtrack to one group of musicians, particularly as much of my film would have no dialogue. The soundtrack would need to carry the feel of ‘As Below’ throughout. Erik Stein revealed to me that the amazing trumpet part on ‘As Below’ was played by Luc Van Lieshout of Tuxedomoon, a group I also knew well and greatly admired. Because it was the trumpet part that I found so perfect, we soon pitched the idea of a joint soundtrack between Cult With No Name and Tuxedomoon.

 
Later on Braatz added a track by John Foxx, the original lead singer of Ultravox. Originating in the Bay Area, Tuxedomoon were one of the most important and influential bands of the post-punk movement. Self-described “post-punk electronic balladeers” Erik Stein and Jon Boux collaborate as Cult With No Name.

More after the jump…

 
It’s a bit late to get ahold of it for a Christmas gift this year, perhaps, but I suspect that the sure-to-be-malign year of 2017 will furnish plenty of opportunities to enhance the life of someone special in your life with the intriguing and evocative “Tarot of Personal Experience,” which comes with its own soundtrack.

The product comes to us from Castle Face Records, and includes a propulsive 7-inch recorded for the occasion by Damaged Bug, a.k.a. John Dwyer, better known to many as the hyper-prolific leading spirit of Thee Oh Sees; he’s also been a member of Coachwhips and Pink and Brown and the Hospitals and is probably cooking up a new musical project even as I write this. Castle Face has put out the last several Oh Sees releases as well.
 

 
The deck comes with 45 tarot cards painted by artist Kyle Ranson. The cards eschew the traditional archetypes of the arcana familiar from the Rider/Waite tarot deck, favoring identities more useful to us in our cacophonous age, such as “Stoner Older Brother” and “Saturday Morning Cartoons.” The deck costs $35 and comes with a limited-release 7-inch called “Smoggy Terminus” which I’ve been playing on repeat all morning and I personally find quite fantastic and utterly appropriate to this project. (The b-side tracks are “Horse Egg 2” and “Stellar Dust.”)

The 45-card deck comes in a hot-foiled card case; there’s also an insert with explanations of the card characteristics and a written introduction by Ranson. The colored 7-inch vinyl comes in a printed jacket with a cover painted by Ranson as well.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…....

 
Way, way back in 1989, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote an obituary of the then-recently deceased activist/organizer/author/provocateur Abbot Howard “Abbie” Hoffman, calling him an “activist with Jewish soul.” That, he was, 100%. There was plenty to criticize about the man—he could be arrogant, and he contributed significantly to the Baby Boom’s decoupling of the left from the labor movement, a move that significantly damaged both institutions—but he brought theatricality and exuberance to the often humorless politics of the left, and he was motivated by a genuine and irrepressible desire to see the spoils of America’s prosperity and justice offered to ALL of its citizens.

Hoffman addressed the Jewish foundations of his political ethos in his autobiography Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, and those connections were discussed in his JTA obit:

“Judaism has never been so much a religion to me as a noble history and a cluster of stereotypes. Jews, especially first-born male Jews, have to make a big choice very quickly in life whether to go for the money or to go for broke.”

Hoffman never made a lot of money, preferring to eschew the life of the yuppie in order to remain loyal to his roots as a Yippie. It conformed with his self-identity as the perennial outsider, a role he viewed as an extension of his Jewishness.

“As a kid, I went to the rabbis and said, ‘What do you think of Philip Roth or Norman Mailer or Joseph Heller, you know, those kinds of writers,’ ” Hoffman told the New Jewish Times newspaper in 1980.

“They would say, ‘Not good for the Jews. Too much self-ridicule, too much mockery.’ But I think this is the destiny for the Jews: to be rebels, to question society. And to be funny. We’re philosophers and comedians.”

More after the jump…

 
It seems like only yesterday I was at a double feature of 200 Motels and Baby Snakes in Santa Monica and Gail Zappa was taking questions from the audience between movies. A scruffy guy sitting in front of me wanted to know: like, what did it mean that Frank’s birthday was December 21? With commendable equanimity and poise, she replied that her late husband had been a Sag, for sure.

Has it really been seven years since those innocent, care- and money-free days? No picnic, but I’ll say this for the Great Recession: at least it was more “Cheap Thrills” than “Concentration Moon.” Gail Zappa was then breathing air, as was Negativland’s Don Joyce, whose KPFA radio show “Over the Edge” became my first podcast subscription right around that time. But look at Don now, resting in that plastic baggie on my shelf. A picture of health he is not.
 

 
In March of ‘95, a little over a year after Frank Zappa’s death, Joyce and Phineas Narco devoted an episode of “Over the Edge” to the composer’s life and work. After playing a tape of Zappa’s 1963 appearance on The Steve Allen Show—the whole thing, with a minimum of manipulation—the pair then go full Negativland on a treasury of primary and secondary sources. For five hours, everything Zappa goes into the blender, from Lumpy Gravy and the Synclavier to interviews and glib, stupid obituaries delivered by 1993 media personalities.

More after the jump…

 
Every Fall I keep my eyes peeled for the appearance of the first Christmas tree. They seem to come earlier every year. The earliest I’ve ever seen one was at the end of September last year when a bright glittering aluminum tree appeared high in a tenement window in the north of the city.

By December windows all across town are glowing bright with colored lights like so many opened windows on an Advent calendar. The earlier the tree, the more likely it is to be aluminum—or “artificial” as we call it in the UK—for obvious reasons.

My parents always had a fake tree, which was taken down from the attic during the second week of December then covered with baubles, tinsel, candy canes and lights. The usual kinda stuff. There was always a great pleasure taken in decorating the tree—a childish excitement at the fast approaching holidays.

Which brings me to these fine vintage photographs from the 1950s and 1960s of women proudly sitting or standing beside their Christmas trees—looking all happy and proud. Though these are quite wonderfully festive pictures they kinda overlook the original history of such seasonal trees as giant phallic symbols that have a pagan history going way back to ancient times.

Depending on who you read the Christmas tree became fashionable with northern Europeans around the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Estonia and Latvia still bicker over who put up the first Christmas tree—the Estonian’s claim they did in 1441—while the Latvians point out they have documentary evidence to the first decorated Christmas tree displayed in Riga in 1510.

Thereafter, the use of trees to celebrate Christmas spreads to northern Germany where the first printed reference of such festive firs appears in 1531. These trees were later decorated with cake, candles and even glass baubles.

This tradition spread to England where in 1800 Queen Charlotte the German wife of George III, “set up the first known English tree at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, in December, 1800.” It would take until during the 1840s when—with a little promotion from Prince Albert, the German husband of Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens—decorated Christmas trees became a seasonal “thing” in people’s houses, rather than town squares or churches. The Christmas tree was seen as a symbol of renewal and hope—which kinda takes it back to its pagan history.

Long, long before Victorians popularized the Xmas tree—the ancient Greeks considered pine trees as sacred to Attis the god of flora and Cybele the Earth goddess. The Greeks were said to decorate their trees with small silver trinkets as a symbol of rebirth and renewal—which was similar to how the ancient Egyptians viewed their palm trees, using palm leaves to decorate their homes as as “sign of resurrection.”

Then there were the Romans who associated evergreens with the return of the sun during their festivities for Saturnalia during December—a period of gift giving, feasting and human sacrifice. The Romans decorated their “trees with bits of metal and replicas of their god, Bacchus [a fertility god]. They also placed 12 candles on the tree in honor of their sun god.”

The evergreen fir tree was seen as a highly potent phallic symbol for continuing fertility during the winter solstice—symbolizing the soon approaching Spring and the birth of new life.
 

Just waitin’ for Santa.
 

Santa knows if you’ve been naughty or nice.
 
More festive women and their Xmas trees, after the jump…

 
After the demise of the MC5, guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith assembled a new band with members of three other Detroit bands of the period: the Stooges (drummer Scott Asheton), the Rationals (guitarist and singer Scott Morgan), and the UP (bassist Gary Rasmussen). The resulting combo, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, recorded what is for me the great American single of the 70s, “City Slang.”

Iggy spent 1977 touring with different configurations of the players on The Idiot and Lust for Life; the only constant was Tin Machine’s future rhythm section, comprising Soupy Sales’ sons Hunt and Tony. In an interview with I-94 Bar, Gary Rasmussen explains how Iggy came to recruit SRB for his ‘78 tour of Europe, on which former Stooge Scott Thurston replaced Scott Morgan:

I think at that time, [Iggy] was having trouble with his record company. He’d been a mess, screwin’ up, and he pretty much needed to prove to the record company that he could do a good tour with a good band - it had to be somethin’ special - and that he wasn’t just a total junkie and all that stuff. He called up and was talking to Scott Asheton to start with, and then to Fred. We knew Iggy because he’d come through with his band and we’d go see ‘em, and we’d be playing some awful place down in Detroit, in Cass Corridor or somewhere, and Iggy would be playing at the Masonic Temple; he’d come to our gig after, y’know, and come up onstage. We were all friends.

So at that point, I think he needed something like that, and asked if we would do that - come and do a tour with him and be his band. Scott Thurston was in that band… Scott was already with Iggy, so he knew all of the songs that Iggy was doing, he knew kinda what was going on, so I think Iggy wanted to keep Scott Thurston in on it, so he didn’t need Morgan, basically. You don’t need another singer… if you ever tried to harmonize with Iggy, you’d realize it’s a pretty hard thing to do. But we didn’t need another singer, we didn’t need another guitar player, so Scott was kinda left out of that one.

 

Iggy Pop onstage with Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, Detroit, 1979 (photo by Robert Matheu, via robertmatheu.com)
 
In the same interview, Morgan says that the tour with Iggy contributed to SRB’s premature dissolution. I’m sure that’s true, and it’s a shame; on the other hand, this is surely one of the best bands Iggy ever had. The Copenhagen bootleg embedded after the jump, which popped up on YouTube earlier this month, is the shit. (For comparison, check out the quality of this boot from the tour’s Stockholm date, and while you’re there, listen to that night’s “Kill City.”)

Keep reading after the jump…

‘Witch and Cat’ (1893).
 
Let’s dig the scene.

It’s the late 1800s—the fin de siecle. Art is all Symbolism and Decadence. You’re an artist. You hang with your buddies. They’re artists too. You all think art is something more than just sex and illustration or mere surface and image. You think art is a form of magic. Artists can change reality with colors. You create pictures that express something of your experience—something from your soul.

You and your buddies have your own little club. It’s a secret brotherhood. You call yourselves Les Nabis—a Hebrew word for “prophet” or “seer.” You think of yourselves as magicians. You dabble in magic and theosophy. You talk about ideas and seek a shared philosophy—some common purpose. You create your own Nabi language and practice arcane rituals. You carry a sceptre made from the snake of wisdom and a pentagram for the occult. You kick off your secret get togethers with a neat little mantra:

Sounds, colors, and words have a miraculously expressive power beyond all representation and even beyond the literal meaning of the words.

That’s your scene.

You are Paul Ranson (1864-1909)—a French artist who takes his lead from Paul Gauguin, mysticism, the occult and spirituality. Les Nabis—the artists you hang with include Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and the group’s founder Paul Sérusier. You’re a bunch of hipsters—pretentious hipsters—but you don’t care. You have this shared belief that a picture only has meaning:

...when it possessed style.That is to say when the artist had succeeded in changing the shape of the objects he was looking at and imposing on them contours or a color that expressed his own personality.

This is what you think of as magic—personal magic.

In some respects Les Nabis anticipated the Fauves, a little Art Deco and more directly Abstract Expressionism—with its emphasis on the artist’s experience expressed through the abstract. Ranson held the society’s meetings at his studio—which he called The Temple. All this ritual and faux language and holding to strange occult and mystical beliefs was an attempt to big up the group’s reputation. They really didn’t need to as the art was good enough to stand and fall on its own merits. However, the cross pollination of ideas from the occult and the quasi-mystical did inspire Paul Ranson to create some very beautiful paintings of witches, mythic beasts, fauns, devils, and religious allegory—Eve, the temptation of Saint Anthony—which are still as magical today.
 

‘Witches in Saturnalia’ (1891).
 

‘Witch in her Circle’ (1892).
 
More of Ranson’s fabulous beasts to be found, after the jump….

 
When UCLA film student student Nettie Peña borrowed a reel-to-reel recorder from the high school where her father worked to record her friends’ new group, The Doors—then the “house band” at a small Sunset Strip nightclub—really more of a scuzzy, beer-stained redneck bar than the name might imply called London Fog—she probably had very little idea that she’d one day contribute their earliest known live recordings to rock ‘n’ roll history, but that’s what happened one night in May of 1966.

Released to coincide with the group’s 50th anniversary, the new London Fog 1966 box set from Rhino is—clearly—something that’s targeted to the most serious Doors fanboys. And there are a lot of ‘em, obviously. The deluxe (and it should be noted quite clever) packaging is designed to look like a run-of-the-mill cardboard storage box, the type that you might store under your bed, or in a closet, and then forget about for fifty years. A time capsule, in other words, and this set lives up to that conceit complete with well done facsimile reproductions of that night’s set list written by Robby Krieger’s hand, Peña’s excellent photographs of the baby-faced Doors printed as ever-so-slightly yellowing 8” by 10” B&W glossies, and even a flyer for a UCLA film school midnight screening of Peña’s student film “Call It Collage ‘66” which had a soundtrack by the Doors. (Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek were Nettie Peña’s fellow students at UCLA.) The music is pressed on a 10” record that looks a bit like an acetate test pressing in a brown sleeve and on a CD.
 

 
Now I don’t tend to be someone taken in by tsotchkes that come in box sets—but this one, I must say, is kinda neat. I’m not even that big of a Doors fan, but a big Doors fan would definitely eat this shit up. And again, that’s the person this limited edition (just 18,000 copies) is targeted at, a big Doors fan who wants to hear the earliest known recording of the legendary Doors.

They do seven songs, blues covers such as B.B. King’s “Rock Me” and Muddy Waters’ “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man.” They do Little Richard’s “Lucille” (an odd choice). There’s an embryonic “You Make Me Real” (later recorded for their second album Strange Days) and a pretty fully-formed version of “Strange Days” which is probably the short set’s highlight. This set is for the hardcore fan who will frankly forgive the generic garage band blues numbers for a chance to hear The Doors picking the lock on the door to something much more divine, working their way from cover band to magicians.

Buy London Fog 1966
 

Andy Warhol and Mario Montez filming Hedy (via Continuo)
 
On the night of January 27, 1966, the actress Hedy Lamarr was arrested for stealing $86 worth of merchandise from the May Company department store in Los Angeles. She was not driven to crime by a condition of need: police told reporters she had $14,000 in checks when she was arrested.

Andy Warhol and screenwriter Ronald Tavel knew a good story when they saw one, and Hedy (1966)—with Lupe and More Milk, Yvette, part of the “Hollywood trilogy” about movie actresses Warhol made that year—advanced down the Factory’s film production line. The lovely Mario Montez starred in the title role, while on the soundtrack, Lou Reed and John Cale dramatized Hedy’s inner life with an ominous, bottomless noise.
 

via Toronto International Film Festival
 
Richie Unterberger’s authoritative White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day files the Hedy soundtrack under February 1966:

Only Lou Reed and John Cale are heard on the soundtrack to Hedy, a Warhol film inspired by press reports of the arrest for shoplifting of 30s and 40s actor Hedy Lamarr. None of the Velvets appear in the film, but the cast does include the two most celebrated dancers of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – Gerard Malanga and Factory newcomer Mary Woronov – as well as another EPI dancer, Ingrid Superstar, and Cale’s old friend Jack Smith.

The Hedy score is closer in spirit to the avant-garde recordings Cale and Angus MacLise appeared on during 1963-1965 than anything The Velvet Underground are currently playing. The music builds around an instrumental storm of shrieking, rumbling viola, guitar, and a rickety piano that sounds like it hasn’t been played since doing time in a 19th century saloon, while Cale’s ‘thunder machine’ – the sound made by the head of a Vox Super Beatle amp being dropped on the floor – occasionally cuts through everything else with hair-raising, high pitch bursts of feedback. This might be the closest approximation of how the nascent Velvet Underground sounded when they played, with Angus MacLise, behind the screen at Piero Heliczer’s ‘happenings,’ but those days are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Hear ‘Hedy’ after the jump…