Back Magick Show on Kickstarter.

This is my second Magick Show Diary. You can read the first one here.

Once a documentary project is greenlighted, you go straight to the research, looking for potential on-camera experts. When it came to something like Magick Show, there were a lot of obvious choices, individuals who were either known to me, or who I knew personally that had to be on the list, but they comprised fewer than half of the people we finally assembled. 

Although I was well aware of the famous #WitchTok hashtag, TikTok isn’t the sort of thing I tend to partake in, so I was starting from scratch there. Primarily I was looking on the app for younger people, but I was also hoping to find within that broad subset a racial and gender mix that would represent millennial and Gen Z occultists more authentically. The occult subculture has always been—to be blunt—a very white and Eurocentric space. It also tends to skew older on the male side. Young witches, as you might expect, are in abundance, and easy to find on TikTok, but I quickly noticed that the vast majority—9.75 out of 10—of the videos that came up from clicking on the #WitchTok hashtag didn’t show anyone’s face. Altars. Lots of altars. Burning candles or burning sage, but rarely any faces. Typically no voices are heard either, you just see affirmational quotes superimposed over all the shots of the candles and altars. Few “personalities” emerge, at least on occult TikTok, and most creators who have broken through, and are seen on camera in their videos, are difficult to take seriously.

I did try to book four people from TikTok but only one of them replied when they were contacted. The young woman who did, I was bitterly disappointed about ultimately not being able to get for Magick Show. She described herself as a chola bruja and the minute I saw her severely plucked eyebrows, I thought “wow this one is a star.” She had a strong presence on camera, she looked great and quite obviously had a very, very big personality. (She ultimately passed due to her infant son not being old enough to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and she didn’t want to be on the subway in NYC, a reasonable excuse, of course.)

So much for #WitchTok. Many of the people who are in Magick Show, I tried to contact via their own websites, but it was surprising how few replied. You’d expect that this would be the easiest way to get in touch with someone, right? Maybe I’m just showing my age, but I would ultimately find that DMing on Instagram was the best way to reach many people. Even then it would take days, and often weeks—and in one case six weeks—before I’d hear back from them. Several people would contact me after I’d already written them off as unreachable. It was perplexing, not something I was used to. Whenever I have asked someone to be on camera for something, I’m used to getting a speedy response. Everyone likes being interviewed, right?

WRONG. Not when it comes to talking about occult stuff, they don’t. Many people publish occult books under pen names, their reason might be their career—one polite “no thanks” mentioned a government gig that the respondent didn’t want to jeopardize. There were several people like that, often with high-paying corporate gigs. With some it was simple shyness. John Zorn told me over email when I asked him if I could interview him for Magick Show that he didn’t do interviews anymore because “mouthing off in public has its price!” And what he meant by that is by respecting his creative muse in this way—those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know—his angels never abandoned him. Another, I felt, quite reasonable excuse. (He sent me some files of some then-unreleased music that seared my synapses. It was the nicest turndown that I’ve ever received.)

But… yeah. It was really difficult to book people for this, much, much harder than I anticipated. In the end, this forced me to work harder and to dig deeper until I assembled, like Profesor Xavier, just the right mutant thinkers, or at least a critical mass of them. I’ve gotten a lot of emails and DMs telling me “You should have gotten so and so…” Trust me, in most cases I did try to get so and so, but so and so never replied to my email or DM. I really wanted to get Erik Davis on camera, but sadly he would be in Germany while I was shooting in LA. I’d still like to get Erik on camera if the Kickstarter does well enough. By and large, I got most of the people I wanted but it was an anxious ordeal, truly one of the most difficult tasks of my entire career.

This is getting long enough, so I’ll end here and pick this up again tomorrow.

See you then.

Back Magick Show on Kickstarter.
 

 
Visit the Magick Show Kickstarter page here

I’ve decided to do a daily sort of “Magick Show Diary” type of thing for the duration of the Magick Show Kickstarter. The month-long sprint when we shot the majority of the (over 50!) interviews was a super fun adventure and each and every day of that saw me meeting as many as eight incredible new people and getting into all sorts of odd and whimsical situations. I can get a lot of blog mileage out of it is what I am saying. I’ll also be conducting some short interviews with some of the participants.

I’m going to start off with a clip from the “What is Magick?” episode, which I see as the overture to the larger project. The foundation, if you will. The rest of the episodes you could watch in any order as long as you’d watch this one first. It’s roughly a three-act structure that begins with a wide variety of people explaining what magick is to them and how they practice their magick. I got some great answers. One thing that all of these vastly different people had in common is that when they answered that question, none of them said anything remotely goofy. You might expect to get at least one kooky woo-woo answer in the mix, but that didn’t happen. What I got instead was an awful lot of amazing interview footage where magick is discussed eloquently and even scientifically by some very, very intelligent people. Someone unacquainted with the occultist mindset, or who had never given the matter any real thought, wouldn’t watch these responses and think “these people are nuts” because they clearly aren’t. The reaction would more likely be one of “hmmm, this all seems somewhat reasonable.” I think many initially skeptical people will walk away from watching Magick Show surprised at their reaction to what they’ve seen. 

To be honest, that was a big part of the goal, and again, I was aided by fifty people who knew what they were talking about, some who can express themselves like poets.

Which brings me to the video. In this clip musician/author Rodney Orpheus declares Aleister Crowley to be “the Einstein of magick” and compares Crowley’s Law of Thelema to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. As the person on the other side of the camera, imagine how happy I was to witness these words, in this order come out of his mouth. As anyone who has ever shot a TV news piece or a documentary will tell you, it’s all about the interviews, and when you’re sitting across from someone and they are giving you what Rodney was offering that morning, you want to do Snoopy’s happy dance of joy afterward. He was so good on camera. I’ve also got him talking about the birth of Chaos magick (he was there), Austin Osmon Spare, and Marjorie Cameron.  Rodney tells the most wonderful anecdote about meeting Marjorie Cameron during a trip to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s. The tale is charmingly told in his great Irish accent and he describes what her home was like (inside and out), recounts their conversations, and what they did (smoked a joint and saw a movie at the Cinerama dome). He even imitates her raspy voice. It’s a solid gold piece of footage, but not something that I’d have ever been able to use on television. You just can’t have someone telling a five-minute-long story on a TV show, but when Magick Show was recontextualized as more of a masterclass thing, or as a big conversation among 50 people, one of the first things that occurred to me was “Oh great, now I can use Rodney’s Cameron story!”

And now, here’s a two-minute clip from Magick Show of Rodney Orpheus explaining Crowley’s Law of Thelema.
 

 
So we’ve got this new thing—maybe you’ve noticed—called Magick Show that we’re very eager to promote. It’s a wide-ranging documentary project about 21st-century occultism and features interviews with over FIFTY authors, experts, witches and other practicing occultists. The participants include media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, musicians Luke Haines and Rodney Orpheus, historian and TV host Mitch Horowitz, comics genius Grant Morrison, authors Gary Lachman, Dr. Christina Oakley Harrington, Amanda Yates Garcia, Melinda Lee Holm, Maja D’Aoust and Bri Luna, the Hoodwitch.

We even got the final interview with underground filmmaking legend Kenneth Anger who died in 2023.

Dear readers, would you mind downloading this image of Grant Morrison and slapping it across all your social media? It’s X, Facebook and Instagram ready! We thank you!

Below, the Magick Show trailer:
 

 
Or you can skip all the verbiage and go directly to the Kickstarter.

Grant Morrison Will Cast a Spell for You. Comics Genius to Support a Kickstarter Campaign for a New Occult Documentary Series with Unusual Offering

Launches this Thursday at midnight

Los Angeles – July 8, 2024 – Renowned comics genius Grant Morrison offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for three lucky individuals to have a personal magick spell cast just for them. This unique reward is part of an ambitious Kickstarter campaign to fund the post-production of Magick Show, a groundbreaking documentary project being described as a “masterclass in the occult.” Magick Show was created by Richard Metzger (Dangerous Minds, Disinformation) and produced by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff.

Grant Morrison, a legendary figure in the world of comics and a practicing magician, has joined the campaign with this extraordinary pledge. For his contribution, Morrison will cast a personalized spell for the backer, blending his vast knowledge of magic and storytelling to create a unique and powerful work of art.

“I’m thrilled to be part of this momentous occasion,” said Morrison. “Quite simply it’s the best show about magic ever made! The best, least sensationalized, most informed presentation of what contemporary magic is and how it works that I’ve ever seen onscreen.” Morrison looks forward to becoming part of the Magick Show community. “It is time to call together the next generation of occultists, expose them to their lineage, and initiate them into the larger culture of practicing magicians.”

The spell includes a consultation with Morrison, who will work with the recipient to focus, calibrate, and aim the spell perfectly.

Morrison is known for his promotion of the “sigil” theory of spellcasting and will create a symbol relating to the accomplishment of the desired outcome on a canvas with paint, delivering a one-of-a-kind artwork to the lucky supporters.

“It seemed pretty obvious that it would be difficult to get many outlets to write about some ‘weird occult documentary project’ on Kickstarter,” said Metzger, “but what if the story was ‘Grant Morrison will personally cast a spell for you’? That’s different. That’s catnip for comics, horror, and sci-fi blogs and the story writes itself. Then it seeps out into public consciousness. That’s how we pitched it to Grant and he readily agreed to help us out.”

Magick Show promises to delve deep into modern occultism’s mysterious world, exploring its influence on contemporary culture and uncovering its hidden truths. With a team of visionary creators at the helm, including Metzger, known for his pioneering work in alternative media, and Rushkoff, an acclaimed author and media theorist, the documentary aims to offer an unprecedented look into the myriad ways magick is practiced in the 21st century.

“Magick inflects the reality in which we live,” Rushkoff explained. “From corporate logos and money systems to warfare and presidential elections. It is everywhere, once you learn to see it. Magick Show teaches us how.”

The Kickstarter campaign seeks to raise $150,000 in 40 days to bring Magick Show to life. In addition to Morrison’s spellcasting, backers can choose from a range of exclusive rewards, including an incredible limited edition poster designed by artist Dima Drjuchin (famous for his work with Tool and Father John Misty) and special acknowledgments and credits in the film.

The campaign is being organized by Magick Show ally and Century Guild founder Thomas Negovan, an inaugural member of Kickstarter’s creator advisory council who has been responsible for over 70 successful campaigns. In his words, “Magick Show is a clarion call for everyone who can feel this acceleration of reality we are experiencing to gather together, to gain focus, and learn to harness that velocity for positive change.”

Anyone wanting to support Magick Show and take advantage of this unique opportunity to have a spell cast for them by Grant Morrison himself, visit the Kickstarter campaign page here when it goes live on Thursday, July 11, 2024.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/richardmetzger/magick-show-a-masterclass-in-modern-occultism

http://magickshow.net

For media inquiries, please contact Richard Metzger [metzger.richard AT gmail DOT com]

About Magick Show: Magick Show is a sprawling documentary project exploring the world of contemporary occultism and its cultural impact. Created by Richard Metzger and produced by Douglas Rushkoff, the project—described as a “documentary bundle”—promises to unveil the secrets and influence of modern magic practices. So far over 50 members of the occult community have been interviewed for Magick Show in London, Los Angeles, and New York City. It includes the final on-camera interview with the legendary underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

About Grant Morrison: Grant Morrison is a celebrated comic book writer, author, screenwriter, and magician, known for his groundbreaking works such as The Invisibles, All-Star Superman, Doom Patrol and Multiversity. His work often explores themes of magic, consciousness, and the nature of reality.
 

 
Have you ever wondered where we disappeared to?

The answer is simple: We just couldn’t take it anymore.

Allow me to explain:

The glory days of the internet are long over. It had a good run, but it’s done.

I’d compare this sorry state of affairs to the history of widespread cocaine use in America, it’s almost the exact same story. (Okay, okay, it’s not even a remotely similar narrative, but don’t harsh my analogy!) At first, it was all fun and games. Pure and undiluted nose candy for the masses. The 1970s must’ve been incredible! But then the Devil’s dandruff starts getting stepped on. Unscrupulous dealers began cutting their Peruvian marching powder with baby laxatives and veterinary dewormers. Ultimately it becomes more of a situation where the dealers were cutting their baby laxative with cocaine and not the other way around. Now it’s all just garbage.

And that what’s happened with Internet content, too. When everyone got online in the mid-90s, it was fun and wild and fascinating. New and novel experiences awaited. Fast forward to today and the World Wide Web is sadly akin to a selfie and meme-filled version of WALL-E’s junkyard planet or an ocean full of plastic bottles and other human-created detritus. A friend of mine once described what we did at Dangerous Minds as “panning for Internet gold” but I told him I thought it was more like spelunking in a dank cave, standing in a river of shit wearing hip-high waders and a gas mask.

Today’s internet is by and large a highly toxic HAZMAT site. Assholes are everywhere you turn. You can’t escape them. But on top of that, all the creativity has vanished. What started as a massive outpouring of cross-cultural communication, international information exchange and just plain HIGH WEIRDNESS has turned into a filtered, Facetuned selfie-infested septic tank of “LOOK AT ME” frivolity, knucklehead narcissism and abject idiocy. The rise of the TikTok “expert” dolling out their supposed wisdom in 45-second increments seems to me an especially pernicious development. These people are seldom experts on anything other than hashtags and yet they all apparently have an audience 10X that of CNN’s.

With the AI apocalypse rapidly encroaching upon us it’s about to get even worse. I knew it when I first saw that Star Wars if it had been directed by Wes Anderson video. “Hmmm, that’s kinda clever” immediately gave way to “Okay I get this and I can’t be bothered to even watch it to the end.” It was a watershed moment for me and when I realized THIS SHIT IS THE FUTURE. 

In retrospect, I wish I was right about this, but when the latest text-to-video AI product, Dream Machine, was released last week, what did the public decide to do with it? Something far more regrettable: animating popular memes! 
 

Dream Machine by Luma AI is just 3 days old.

Now memes are becoming videos.

10 wild examples:

1. Distracted boyfriendpic.twitter.com/QXNDQdkY4P

— Madni Aghadi (@hey_madni) June 15, 2024

 
I know, let’s make it worse! That short animated clip of the Distracted Boyfriend meme represents—sums up even—how low we’ve sunk culturally. This is it, people, the crown of creation. This mindless nonsense is the rest of your life and for the lives of every generation to come until the world finally ends in a paroxysm of kitsch.

Wouldn’t it have been better to point all this capital and technology towards developing a utopian future where no one has to work and everyone is freed up to develop their own individuality and creativity?

NOPE! Not when you can have an animated “Zuckerberg is watching” meme instead!!
 

7. Zuckerberg is watchingpic.twitter.com/NphmK5nvg8

— Madni Aghadi (@hey_madni) June 15, 2024

 
We simply couldn’t take it anymore. The Internet has just gotten too fucking dumb. And it’s hardly a case of the culture being dumbed down. On the contrary, it’s being dumbed UP.

So Dangerous Minds is evolving into something new. We’re going to do something different. Something that’s not been filtered or Facetuned or to be found anywhere in this cultural wasteland full of regurgitated garbage. Something with actual experts who know what they’re talking about and can speak intelligently for longer than a minute. Something that will make you smarter.

We’ll announce what this new venture is in the coming days, so keep watching this space, where all will be revealed…

 
John Peel’s oft-repeated line about how the Fall’s music was “always different, always the same” could also be said about the output of English singer-songwriter Scott Lavene, although with just four albums under his belt, he’s got a long way to go before catching up to the Fall’s apparently infinite back catalog. And much like the late Mark E. Smith’s, Lavene’s music is so infused with his own idiosyncratic personality and lyrical preoccupations (custard, double denim, drinking, stealing roses from his racist neighbor’s garden) that no one would ever mistake one of his songs for anyone else’s. With his latest album, Disneyland in Dagenham, Lavene’s tunes are, in fact, largely the same as heard on his previous two long players (2019’s Broke and 2021’s Milk City Sweethearts) which is not, I hasten to add, an indication of actual sameness, but more an indication of consistently high quality and great songwriting. That he delivers exactly what his audience expects from a Scott Lavene album—always different, always the same and always really fucking good.

According to TIDAL, I’ve listened to Disneyland in Dagenham 186 times in the past month. I’ve already listened to it from start to finish twice today and it’s not even 9 am here. I think it’s safe for the reader to assume that I really love this album. It’s world-class. All killer, no filler.  An instant classic. Every song is a 10 out of 10. I like every single song on it so much that it almost seems like a greatest hits album to my ears after only four weeks. I could say the same about his other albums, too. Another observation about Lavene’s music—this occurred to me while revisiting his previous albums—is how well they are sequenced and how satisfying they are as start-to-finish listens. That and his arrangements are really sophisticated. Yes indeed, Disneyland in Dagenham is exactly what I expected from a Scott Lavene album and after a three-year wait, I was not the slightest bit disappointed. I mean, who listens to the same album 186 times in one month?

Scott Lavene has been compared a lot to Ian Dury—I’ve done it myself—and that is a valid juxtaposition for quite a few reasons. First off, who’d mistake one of Ian Dury’s songs for anyone else’s? The same could be said of Lavene’s music. They both embrace narrative songwriting, wry portrayals of dodgy characters they’ve met along the way, wild nights out, working-class Britain, self-reflection, humor, Billericay, and wordplay, each capable of finding profound insights in life’s most mundane details. Additionally, the two men share a similar… let’s call it a “life force” that emanates from the grooves of their records. Were Ian Dury still alive, I suspect he’d see the commonality between their work himself.

Allow me to clarify further: Being compared to someone like Ian Dury as a songwriter would indicate an ineffably unique approach, would it not? It’s not that I think Lavene is all that influenced by Ian Dury. There might be some influence, sure, but if I can express this properly the thing that they probably have most in common as songwriters is that they are both, and cannot pretend to be otherwise, genuinely who they are. The music itself doesn’t sound even remotely the same, it’s the approach, and the strength of the personality. You don’t hear that much true originality or individuality anymore and when you do it’s striking. It stands out. Just as Mark E. Smith could only sound like Mark E. Smith, and Ian Dury sound like Ian Dury, Scott Lavene can only sound like Scott Lavene. 

Disneyland in Dagenham kicks off with “Paper Roses,” a wistful ballad of doomed love, a duet of sorts with The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn lending his distinctive gravelly voice as a cynical bookie who won’t accept a bet on the relationship lasting. “Custard” is about family life, walking the dog, and, you guessed it, custard. “Debbie,” one of the album’s singles, portrays the titular subject, a mad inventor on a mission for Zeus, surrounded by her machinery and lots and lots and lots of fuses. (“Take the bread out of that, it’s not a toaster” goes the whispered chorus.)

“Horse and I” sounds like it started as a short story—I was reminded of both Bob Dylan’s Tarantula “novel” (which I HIGHLY recommend) as well as Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes—and tells the tale of Lavene and an equestrian pal busking across France performing Talking Heads and Cure covers. It’s a masterpiece in under four minutes. I fucking love this one. The album’s title track is a bittersweet and delicate paean to life outside of London, then we get to “Sadly I’m Not Steve McQueen” a bouncy New Wave raver of a song namechecking the macho Hollywood legend and imagining that he’d be the sad one not to be Scott Lavene if he only knew what he was missing out on. It’s fantastic and is followed by another banger, “Julie Johnson” a song I usually play twice in a row, if not ten times in a row every time I listen to Disneyland in Dagenham (which, I will remind you has been quite often in recent weeks.) “Little Bird” is a sweet ballad about two lovers being viewed by a feathered friend. It could be a tear-jerker in a Broadway or West End musical. “Rats” finds Lavene asking if he “can just be America’s sweetheart” and the amusing “Keeping it Local” ably caps a very satisfying song cycle.

Let me conclude by inviting you to listen to Disneyland in Dagenham below and reminding you that once you’ve finished, you’ll want to check out the rest of Scott Lavene’s catalog. If you’ve never heard his wonderful music before, I envy you, because you’re in for a fantastic treat.
 

“Disneyland in Dagenham”
 

“Debbie”
 

“Sadly, I’m Not Steve McQueen”
 

Julie Johnson

It’s too bad words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘epic’ have been so overused by excitable film critics, because Sion Sono’s Love Exposure is an actual epic masterpiece that is going to dominate the filmscape for decades.” - New York Asian Film Festival

“Japan’s eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Alejandro Jodorowsky”—Film Four

Japanese auteur Sion Sono’s extraordinary 2008 film Love Exposure (“Ai no mukidashi”) is the epic—yet still whimsical—story of Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima), the “king of the perverts.” Yu is the ninja master of the “up skirt” photograph. After his mother dies, Yu’s father becomes a Catholic priest. He insists that his son confess his sins to him. Yu, a good boy, has nothing really to confess so he just makes stuff up that his father doesn’t even believe. Eventually he falls in with a new crowd and soon his transgressions are a bit more… sinful. Still, Yu himself is not aroused by his own panty shots and lives an otherwise chaste life as he patiently awaits the arrival of his one true love. He’s only “sinning” for the sake of his relationship with his father.

Yu loses a bet and he is obliged to dress as a woman and kiss a girl he likes. As the boys are goofing off, they come across a young girl, Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), who is about to be attacked by a gang. Yu is instantly smitten with the beautiful Yoko and—still dressed as a woman—he jumps into the fight and together they kick the gang’s collective ass. To fulfill the conditions of the bet, Yu kisses Yoko who begins to think she is a lesbian and crushes hard on Yu’s disguise of “Miss Scorpion” (an obvious nod to the 70s Japanese women in prison Female Convict Scorpion film series) Yu believes he has finally met his one true love… and she thinks he’s a woman!
 

 
Yu then finds out that his father the priest has a new girlfriend and will be leaving the priesthood to marry her. Guess who his new step sister is going to be?

The entire first hour of the film—the title card appears 58 minutes in—is but a prologue, setting up what’s to come. The Aum Shinrikyo-like cult religion, the gory violence and the explosions all happen later…It’s a pretty epic love story as far as they go. Trust me, you have never seen THIS film before (or anything else even remotely like it). But you really need to.

I’d recommend Sono’s loopy masterpiece (and it is a masterpiece) to anyone with a taste for unusual world cinema, which is not to say it’s esoteric in any way, because it’s not. Love Exposure is a real crowd pleaser. It’s an event! It may run for four hours, true, but it felt like two, trust me, don’t be intimidated by the length. Even if someone doesn’t love it as much as I do, surely they would appreciate it. It’s such an unusual cinematic experience. And it’s great fun. When it was over, I was sad there wasn’t more. When’s the last time you felt that way about a four hour film? Feel that way about Ben Hur or The Irishman?
 

A trailer for Sino Sono’s ‘Love Exposure’ with English subtitles. I can’t say that it’s successful at getting the film’s point across, but that would just be impossible.

It didn’t take but a minute after the film had ended for me to jump online and try to buy the film’s soundtrack. It doesn’t exist as such, but aside from a bit of Beethoven’s “Symphony No.7 in A Major” and Ravel’s “Bolero” the entire four hour film’s soundtrack consists of three amazing songs by the long running Japanese psych rock band Yura Yura Teikoku (“The Wobbling Empire”). These same three songs are played over and over and over again. After four hours, they are drilled into your DNA for life.

Although I personally had never heard of them before, Yura Yura Teikoku were around from 1989 to 2010. They are one of the very few “underground” groups in Japan ever to become a major commercial act. They almost never played outside of Japan, and were, and still are, criminally obscure outside of their homeland. I’ll try to describe their sound, but it’s sort of pointless as Yura Yura Teikoku cover so much territory from song to song. They’re intense, but they’re melodic. At times the trio—who describe their own music simply as “psychedelic rock”—sound like Can crossed with Phish. Or early Flaming Lips doing a spaghetti western theme. Other times they remind me of a 60s garage rock band like The Sonics, but the next song will sound like Lloyd Cole. The one after that sounds like the lovechild of Neu! and the Grateful Dead. Or even the Ventures channeled through Ennio Morricone or a combination of Pink Floyd with The Blow Monkeys! Suffice to say, they are all over the map musically, from heavier riff-based guitar rock to prettier tunes that would make a great soundtrack for a picnic on a sunny day. From hard-rock workouts that will crush your head to things that you would whistle along with. Black Sabbath to Burt Bacharach on the same album, if not the same song.

The one area of commonality that nearly ALL of Yura Yura Teikoku’s music has—trust me, because I’ve been positively gorging myself on it lately—is that their songs posses a quality that make them sound uncannily familiar. The three songs featured so prominently in Love Exposure are especially adept earworms.  Have a listen to my new favorite band, Yura Yura Teikoku. Chances are that they might become your new favorite new band, too.
 

“Kudo desu (Hollow Me)”
 
More after the jump…

 
Sorry, but this is not going to be one of those analog vs. digital rants that goofball audiophile types like to indulge in at the drop of a hat. In fact I probably should have just called it something like “Why you should never buy new vinyl versions of classic albums.”

Actually I like digital audio just fine. In fact, until four years ago, I’d have told you that I preferred it. SACDs, HDCDs, High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Rays, 24-bit HD master audio files, 5.1 surround sound, DSD files—I have a large amount of this kind of material, both on physical media and with another ten terabytes on a computer drive. I like streaming audio very much. Roon is the bomb! Let me be clear, I’ve got no problem with digital audio. Even if I did, 99.9% of all music made these days is produced on a computer, so there’s really no practical way to avoid it. Analog and digital audio are two very separate things and each has its own pluses and minuses. I like them both for different reasons.

Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost none of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you.

Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail.

Continues after the jump…

 
Bud Lee (1940-2016) is a great American photographer whose work has somehow been overlooked. A prolific contributor to Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who regularly ran extensive portfolios of his work, he took iconic photos of figures as varied as Warhol’s Factory and its superstars, Tennessee Williams, Al Green, James Brown, ZZ Top and Norman Rockwell. Lee covered the Newark riots, and the funerals of Robert Kennedy Jr and Martin Luther King Jr for Life, trailed transgender performance troupe the Cockettes from San Francisco to New York for their ill-fated off-Broadway debut, and shot production stills on the set of Fellini’s Satyricon, Alice’s Restaurant, and Fiddler on the Roof.

Lee ‘retired’ from magazine work in the early ‘70s and and moved to Iowa, where he founded the Iowa Photographers’ Workshop, as a companion program to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He later moved to Tampa, Florida, where he married art teacher Peggy Howard and started a family. He became very active in the local arts scene around Tampa, Ybor City and Plant City, helping to stage a number of outrageous happenings, as the Artists and Writers Ball, an annual themed costumed ball that harnessed the same freaky anything-goes energy had had experienced in the company of the Cockettes and on Fellini’s movie sets. An aspiring filmmaker, Lee also shot a no-budget remake of Gone With The Wind with a cast entirely made up of children from local schools.

In August 1970, Lee turned his lens on Iggy Pop while attending one of the Stooges’ legendary shows at Ungano’s in New York, which was recorded by Stooges A&R, Danny Fields, heavily-bootlegged, and reported on extensively by underground rock magazines like CREEM. During the show, backstage, and even at Iggy’s digs in the Chelsea Hotel, Lee took a series of incredible, candid photos of the Stooges frontman at the very height of his ‘Ig’-ness. A few were published in a short-lived underground magazine entitled Earth (as seen here). Most have never been seen.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cover of the short-lived Earth magazine.