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Author Archives: Carl Macki
Even/Odd Films’ The Boombox Collection –“Zion I: ‘Ope-tivity!”
“Video from “The Boombox Collection: Zion I” (about 10 min)
Zion I, as part of “The Boombox Collection,” is described as “an intimate portrait and performance series peering into the minds pioneering “working class” Hip Hop artists.”
“Zion I” was directed by Mohammad Gorjestani. (Played at Noise Pop Festival, Artists’ Television Access, Feb. 18th.
Zion I: You can feel the downhome sincerity here. Here in the Oakland ‘hood. You can Zion I at home, at work, and eventually giving the kind of performance that’s sustained them 20 years and counting.
DIY does not translate well when applied to gentrification.
At the helm of Zion I is Bay Area MC Zumbi, who has been steadfast in his choice not to rap about “money, power, and bitches,” and instead shares his knowledge and wisdom at the cost of mainstream acceptance.
Credits:
- Production Company: Even/Odd
- Directed by: Mohammad Gorjestani
- Produced by: Malcolm Pullinger Director of Photography: Mike Gioulakis
- Editor: Carson Porter Steadicam Operator: Stew Cantrell
- Location Sound: Max Hirtenstein Sound Design & Mix: Joel Raabe
- Production Assistant: Reza Tabesh, Rachael Gorjestani, Shervin Nakhjavani, Antonio Stroughter
- Consulting Editor: Ashley Rodholm
- Associate Producer: Pedro Javier Hill
even/odd films
@evenoddfilms
From the Even/Oddwebsite:
About
Ashley Rodholm Director and Editor Malcolm Pullinger Partner and Creative Director Mohammad Gorjestani Partner and Director (left to right)
Even/Odd is a production company & creative studio founded by filmmakers.
Regardless of format, our aim is to capture authentic stories and cinematic worlds driven by characters exploring relevant issues and timeless themes.
Our work has earned a Webby Award, two SF ADDYs, and numerous Vimeo Staff Picks, and has been featured by The Guardian, VICE, The Atlantic, and industry publications like AdWeek and Filmmaker Magazine.
We have collaborated with notable partners including Airbnb, Square, Pinterest, and Google. Our films have been created with agency partners as well as direct-to-client. Our independent projects have screened at prominent film festivals including SXSW, Tribeca, and DOC NYC.
As a full-service production company, we take on projects from end-to-end or any step along the way.
We are based in San Francisco, and work globally.
The Boombox Collection: Boots Riley
Short Film
Boots Riley, frontman of the politically-radical hip-hop group, “The Coup”, takes us on a drive through Oakland, and reflects on his music, his future, and his relentless revolt against capitalism. The film is part of The Boombox Collection, a series of shorts about the pioneers of hip-hop.
Released in partnership with Adbusters.
L7 — “Pretend We’re Dead.” A Documentary. . .
L7 documentary
A Documentary by Sarah Price (Blue Hats Creative)
To be published in Punk Globe, April ’17.
Running Time – 1:33 Genre – Documentary
https://youtu.be/D3qFKB78uic TRAILER 127 minutes.
This most famous song title by LZ also informs the title of this Sarah Price-directed (“American Movie,” “The Yes Men Save the World”) documentary.
To think that when I first heard the name “L7,” I thought it stood for a Lagangian Point, that is, a point of space between two large gravitational bodies that is relatively stable; a parking space, if you will.
L7 is a 50s term, meaning a “square” – a kind of person–not a smoke. If you put one of your hand’s thumb and forefinger to form an “L,” and the ones, on the other hand, to make a “7,” put them together– and you’ve got a “square.”
Well, L7 has been called far from square—but it can also mean “odd-“ – and this doco delightfully proves it.
Beginning with a scene in a van where shadowy figures are bouncing up and down and a decidedly urgent voice is screaming, “Just shut up and fuck me, dammit, just shut up and fuck me!”
Ha ha. It was just a ruse. These women are pretty funny!
The film moves to scenes of tour and concert scenes. According to the Guardian UK newspaper, “Pretend We’re Dead” picked out footage from ’85- ’01 over 100 hours of Sparks’s personal assortment from her archives. “We documented ourselves pretty well because we thought no one else would care,” says Sparks. “It will be evocative of an era that doesn’t exist any longer.”
In front of a Peterbilt truck, the band members announce themselves:
“I am Donita Sparks, guitar, vocals. . .Dee Plaka, drums. . .Suzi Gardner, guitar, vocals . . .Jennifer Finch, bass, vocals.”
Then the film explodes into “Fast and Frightening” —
“The film includes the band’s never-before-seen home flicks, performances, talking heads, and meer-poppins.
L7-We hear from one of their biggest fans, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic (also Foo Fighters and Flipper; director of “L7 – The Beauty Process”)—“They had the riffs, the rhythm—they just rocked!”
Punk doyenne Exene
A L7 concert was such an unpredictable barrage of sound and mayhem, with such primal thrash, that they were first classified as heavy metal. But as time wore on, it was obvious they were nothing like the misogynistic, intolerant or violent heavy metal bands of the day.
Shirley Manson opines about the band in a snippet: “”They were openly, brazenly feminist, and I really responded to that.” Garbage bandmate of producer of L7’s album “Bricks Are Heavy” Butch Vig
and Veruca Salt’s Louise Post, Joan Jett, X’s Exene Cervenka, and others are highlighted in the film. Look at L7’s visit dates here.”
Donita Sparks was born in Chicago, grew up in a suburb — Oak Lawn–made the ‘scene’ in Chicago (at such seminal clubs like O’Banion’s, the Lucky Number and Neo) as a teenager but soon after graduation from high school moved to LA.
L7 co-founder Suzi Gardner (who later became famous for being the first woman to be “tit cast” by Cynthia Plaster Caster), lived in the Silverlake neighborhood where “all the art punks lived.” She had developed a reputation for being a poet and writer (LA Weekly), which pissed her off because she wanted to be known as a ROCKER [emphasis added].
Another Chicago native, Dee Plakas joined L7 in 1987. After running through a number of drummers L7 welcomed Dee to the band in 1987.
Jennifer Finch, even though she played with Courtney Love in S.F. band Sugar Baby Doll/Babylon and with the LA band the Pandoras, was not an very accomplished bass player at the time she met Donita and Suzi, but her connectedness with the LA punk scene impressed the members of the band and so she joined, making up for her lack of technical virtuosity with attitude. She was responsible for taking the band to the next level but departed in 1996.
Courtney Love kept in touch with the band and convinced them to come to Seattle, which was like the difference between night (LA) and day. They were treated like a real rock band, not a novelty–and their performance led to a signing by SubPop, a leading alternative label; and which led to a tour of Europe. “Smell The Magic” their second album followed (1990).
In 1992 they were signed to Warner Brothers/Slash/Elektra. Grunge had become everywhere, thanks largely to the massive success of Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” Bands like Sonic Youth were being played on MTV and underground bands were being featured on “Nightflight.”
Their album, “Bricks Are Heavy” produced by Nivana producer Butch Vig, was a dip in the sea of heavy metal while still on the beach of grunge. It received generally positive reviews and was their best-selling album to date. “Pretend We’re Dead,” written and sung by Donita Sparks, was one of the eleven tracks on the album, and it received significant airplay not only in the US but in many other countries as well.
(Some have noted that the riffs on “Pretend You’re Dead” sound like a speeded-up version of a Suicidal Tendencies song. As far as I can tell the bands are friends, and no offense was taken. A similar charge was levied against Puddle of Mudd’s “She Hates Me,” but that’s another story.)
Around this time, In 1991 L7, along with the music editor of LA Weekly, started Rock 4 Choice, a series of concerts to benefit women’s pro-choice groups. They went on for a decade and provided a venue for artists Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Melissa Etheridge, Siste Double Happiness, Foo Fighters, Hole, Joan Jett, the Offspring, Salt ‘n’ Pepa, Pearl Jam, and many others.
There is footage of L7 in 1991-92 at Smart Studio, Butch Vig’s audio workshop in Madison, Wisconsin, where Butch Fig recorded “Bricks. . . .”
Their European Tour, “Hungry for Stink,” their fourth album did fairly well, especially in the UK where one of their singles from the album, “Andres” made it to #34 on their music charts.They did not make a “stink” at Lollapalooza ’94, where their setting was tame and they were booked in the daytime. not as controversial as their Reading ’92 one, where Donita Spark pulled out a tampon out of herself and tossed it into a crowd, riotous and angry due to an equipment delay.
Most of the time they spent offstage partying and getting to know the other bands– George Clinton, Smashing Pumpkins, The Breeders, Beastie Boys, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Japan tour. Selling their panties to fans. Concert in London. Warner Bros. dropped them while they played with KISS and Rage Against the Machine.
Frank Zappa once said, “When you go on the road, it makes you crazy.”
Back to where they started: DIY. “All we have is us—us, and a booking agent. So they started their own label: Wax Tadpole, and put out their sixth and final album done in a studio, “Slap-Happy.” In collaboration with Bong Load Records.
LZ was reduced to a trio, as Gail Greenwood, the most recent bassist left the band. before recording it.
Bong Load would have major success with a single “Loser,” by Beck in 2001, but not this one album. Lagging sales were bleak, critics were divided. Eventually, the unsold copies at a distributor went into a landfill.
It was, therefore, no surprise that the band went in hiatus 2001
All in all, besides the ones already mentioned, director Price interviewed CSS, Allison Wolfe (Bratmobile), Exene Cervenka, Lydia Lunch, Joan Jett, 7 Year Bitch, Louise Post (Veruca Salt), the Donnas’ Allison Robertson, and Distillers founder Brody Dalle.
Much more to tell. Just go see it. It was crowdfunded by a Kickstarter campaign.
L7 Pretend You’re Dead Kickstarter Pick
Anubis Walked With A Limp: Jan Kerouac
Anubis walked with a limp–Jan Kerouac
Jan Kerouac
We wanted her to be like a figure in a painting by Botticelli [or a China doll]
instead, we got Jackson Pollock [in all his glory].
Gerry gave me her address before I landed in L.A.
I looked for her apartment in Hollywood.
rang the bell and as we talked
spread my writings across her living room floor
The Dodgers won their game in Chavez Ravine that day
it was still sunny
when we went to a Moroccan restaurant on Sunset
overlooking the hotel where John Belushi died
It felt dizzy and not at all glamorous
[She was] like St. Lucy forced into prostitution
And I some unnamed Sicilian jackal
Peddling saline drachmas in a salt-encrusted temple
Of timeless interference
when she died, my vision was restored.
C.M. 3/14/17
From WIKIPEDIA
Janet Michelle “Jan” Kerouac (February 16, 1952 – June 5, 1996) was an American writer and the only child of beat generation author Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac.
Early life and career
Kerouac was born in Albany, New York. Her mother left her father while pregnant, and Jack refused to acknowledge the baby as his daughter. A blood test when Jan was nine years old proved his paternity and he was ordered to pay $52 a week for her upbringing. Jan met her father only twice, at the blood test in 1961 and again in 1967, when she visited him at his mother’s home in Florida, before traveling to Mexico with her first husband, John Lamb Lash. For the next few decades, she traveled across the country with a fearless curiosity that echoed that of her father and Neal Cassady.[citation needed]
She began to write seriously in the mid 1970s, often seeking guidance through correspondence with her Godfather, Allen Ginsberg.[citation needed]
Jack Kerouac died in 1969 and Jan began a long legal process through the 1970s and 1980s that would eventually give her rights to one-half of the literary revenue from his books sold domestically. Her friendship with Carolyn Cassady bolstered her drive to achieve this; Carolyn once remembering her fondly as a “poor little lost waif.”[this quote needs a citation] Encouraged by Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia, she entered into a lawsuit in the 1990s that proposed the will of Jack’s mother, Gabrielle Kerouac was a forgery, in the hope winning could expand her legal rights to her father’s works and physical property. Eventually a court ruled that the will was indeed a forgery, although in practical terms this ruling changed nothing concerning control of the Kerouac estate[1]
Kerouac published two semi-autobiographical novels, Baby Driver in 1981,[2][3] and Trainsong in 1988. She was working on a third novel, Parrot Fever, at the time of her death.[citation needed]
Personal life
Jan spent her younger years living with her mother, twin sisters and brother on New York City’s Lower East Side. Shortly before the Beatles arrived in the US, she co-formed a girl group, The Whippets, with her friend Bibbe Hansen. Kerouac married and divorced twice. She delivered a stillborn child, Natasha, in 1968.[citation needed] Through the 1970s, she traveled extensively, always eventually returning to the homes of her mother and brother in Washington State. She was a baker and painted abstract watercolors.[citation needed]
Death
On June 5, 1996, Kerouac died in Albuquerque, New Mexico a day after her spleen was removed. She had suffered kidney failure five years earlier and was on dialysis.[4] She was survived by twin half-sisters, Katharine and Sharon, and one half-brother, David Stuart.[citation needed]
Works
Dharma Punk-tuation
Dispatches from the Noise Pop Festival
The annual Noise Pop Festival in San Francisco is twenty-five years old! I have been ignoring it for so long that I decided to visit one of the venues, Artists’ Television Access, the non-profit art gallery and screening salon on Valencia in the heart of the Mission District in to watch some of the films, one a feature length import from Germany called “My Buddha Is Punk.”
1. Dharma Punk-tuation
(2015) (1 hr 8 min) #music #punk #documentary
Kyaw Thu Win Is in a punk band call Rebel Riot. He is a cheerful mid-twenties-year-old who lives in Yangon (AKA Rangoon), the largest city of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). His homeland is a burgeoning riot of over 100 ethnic grouping just north-west of Thailand and sharing a long border with it going south.
At the time, Myanmar was run by a military dictatorship, albeit slowly making political reforms amidst the rise of pro-democracy advocate and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy, but there is still a civil war going on, and with multiple ethnic clashes, especially between Buddhists and Muslims.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the country in 2011 and President Obama one year later.
The country has been under military rule for about thirty years. An ostensibly civilian leadership came to power in 2010, but there are few real civil freedoms.
Kyaw is determined to develop the punk scene in Myanmar. He lives in a communal arrangement called Common Street with other punks, and travels repeatedly to regime’s promises, and wants to raise awareness of his country’s repeated violations of human rights.
Through his music and demonstrations, he criticizes the ongoing civil disturbances in Myanmar and the targeted persecution of ethnic minorities nonaligned with the government.
He travels the country and at his own band’s gigs to promote his own spiritual and political philosophy among the young generation: it’s a melding of Buddhism and Punk that is purely non-religious and non-authoritarian. This presents a major challenge for him, a dilemma that is not resolved but fuels the energy of his passion as a cultural renegade and musical creator.
This is a very impressive production done entirely by a German crew. It is making the rounds of festivals and university screenings and can be watched in its entirety from one of the sources here.
About the Director
Andreas Hartmann is a filmmaker and cinematographer headquartered in Berlin. He won a scholarship to Myanmar to make this, his second documentary during 2012 and 2013. His new documentary Free Man (2016), is about a young nonconformist living on the streets of Kyoto as a jiyujin (free man).
Facebook page.
Note: This article may soon be reprinted in the pages of Punk Globe.
Art As Therapy
Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 弥生 Kusama Yayoi?, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, soft sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition, and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced her contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and George Segal and exhibited works alongside the likes of them.[1]
In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary media, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde during the early 1960s where she became associated with the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.
Kusama’s work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, and Tate Modern in 2012.[2][3][4] In 2006, she received a Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.[5] In 2008, Christie’s New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist.[6] In 2015 Artsy named her one of the Top 10 Living Artists of 2015.[7] —
Wikipedia–Yayoi Kusama
The Last Days of Jan Kerouac: A Mourner’s Tale
A chapbook by Gerald Nicosia
Nobody is better qualified to write Jan’s Kerouac’s story than Gerald Nicosia.
His deep knowledge of her life, his insight and historical depth plus deep compassion make him the ideal witness.”
— David Meltzer
Beat biographer Gerald Nicosia knew Jan Kerouac for at least the last fifteen years of her life and has written an excerpt “The Last Days of Jan Kerouac,” of a larger biography to reprise Jan’s literary career and life as the only biological progeny of her famous father, Jack Kerouac.
Includes Author’s Note–This edition was brought out to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Jan’s death. It is being published in its present form without notes or sources. It is a 53-page chapbook containing his writings so far in a biography entitled, “Kerouac Princess: The Life and Work of Jan Kerouac.”
Jan Kerouac died in 1996 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, right after she had had an operation removing her spleen.
Despite receiving positive reviews for her two published novels, like her famous father, she did have her detractors.
From a review and interview with her in the New York Times: “I couldn’t get into Jan Kerouac’s books. They were apprentice works. It was obvious she had talent, but she needed somebody to show her the way. It never happened.
“Ernest Hebert is a professor of English at Dartmouth College.”
In addition to working as her literary agent, trying to get her third novel, Parrot Fever, placed with a publisher, Nicosia eventually saw himself as a writing coach for Jan.
“I received rejection after rejection on Jan’s manuscript, and some of them were brutal. Editors not only wondered if Jan knew where she was going in Parrot Fever, some of them also wondered if she even had anything else worth saying after telling her sad tale of being Jack’s daughter. A long process then commenced between us. in which I evolved from Jan ‘s literary agent to her writing coach. I suggested she create an outline, to make sure that the novel did stay on track, and I began suggesting scenes the novel needed in order to have the impact Jan sought. In fact, this coaching would go on till the very end of her life, as she finally circled in toward completion of the manuscript, almost four years later.”
Her fatal problems with her spleen were related to her kidney failure, which occurred in 1991. She had been on daily self-dialysis because of her serious issues with her kidneys’ malfunctioning.
Before moving to Albuquerque, Jan lived briefly in Marin, near author Nicosia, who became a mentor and her champion in her battles with the Kerouac Estate.
A lot of the description here deals with her difficulties in obtaining her lawful share of her father’s estate, which ballooned to over twenty million dollars some fifty years after Jack Kerouac’s death in 1969
Cover of Chapbook
Jan was the author of three novels:
- Baby Driver (1981)
- Trainsong (1988)
- Parrot Fever (1992–93, unpublished)
According to Google Books, ‘This book deals with the final few years of Jan Kerouac’s life when she was working on her last novel Parrot Fever and fighting for rights to her father Jack Kerouac’s estate.”
This chapbook as a special edition may be available from the author. His email address is gerald@geraldnicosia.com.
Gerald Nicosia will be reading from the manuscript “Kerouac Princess” on March 14th, at 7 pm, Depot Bookstore and Cafe, 87 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley, CA.
Addendum: Video of Jan Kerouac talking about her father.
From Wikipedia:
Gerald Nicosia (November 18, 1949 in Berwyn, Illinois) is an author, poet, journalist, interviewer, and literary critic.
Author Nicosia with Jan Kerouac
He received a B.A. and an M.A. in English and American Literature, with Highest Distinction, in English, from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971 and 1973, respectively.
He has written book reviews for the past 25 years for many major American newspapers including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Kansas City Star, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
Nicosia is probably best known as a biographer of Jack Kerouac. He has also been an advocate and supporter of the late Jan Kerouac, Jack’s estranged daughter.
In 2001 Nicosia’s Home to War was published. The book covers the problems faced by Vietnam Veterans returning to an ungrateful nation. It also discusses the battle to stop the use of Agent Orange. [1]
In January 2009, Nicosia edited and published the collection Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory, containing photos and written essays and remembrances about her.
Reggae Business Card
Corporations Are People, Too — Poetry by Jerome Sala
Photo of Author. Credit: Turtle Point Presshttp://www.turtlepointpress.com/traveltainted/4-poems/
Jerome Sala’s Corporations Are People, Too
NYQ Books: Join our general mailing list to be informed
when it becomes available. . .
(Anticipated Publication Date: May 5, 2017)
Cover Art: Ferdinand and Imelda City, 1986, oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in.
© The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brown family, by Roger Brown, American (1941- 1997)
“As is well known, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution enables a corporation to be considered a person—with many of the rights granted to (human) individuals. But has anyone considered how this person might talk, or, for that matter, write poems? Corporations Are People, Too! is the first to explore such an idea. It begins with thirty “Corporate Sonnets,” many constructed out of the corporate speak we hear and use ourselves every day. Then it goes on to examine how this language becomes part of who we are—from the products we consume, and their meanings, to the ways we think and speculate. The result is something new—both elevated and crass at the same time. The great American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey urged thinkers of his own time to “acknowledge the significance of economic factors in life, rather than evading the issue.” In a witty, satirical and entertaining manner—that employs both traditional and innovative forms—this collection takes up that challenge for today.”
Recommendation
Jerome Sala burns all of the rule books. His poems need to be read out loud as we ditch our cubicles and throw out our tablets. This timely book seems to have been written from the inside out—dissecting advertorials with ready-mades and raging at capitalistic indifference. As the poet himself ponders in one of his sonnets, “Perhaps its stasis urges us to disbelieve.” He is a writer that I want on my side. Thank you, Jerome Sala, for this electric meditation on our frozen world.
—Kostas Anagnopoulos
“Jerome Sala’s Corporations Are People, Too! not only brilliantly skewers Corporate America’s hypocrisy, obfuscation, in- and anti-humanity etc., but does so utilizing poetic forms and strategies so expertly it could be considered two different equally successful books, one an illustration of perfect poetic craft, the other a unique screed exposing in a totally original way the many failings of a commodity-based culture.”
—Michael Lally
About the Author
“Jerome Sala’s books of poetry include cult classics such as Spaz Attack, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, The Trip, Raw Deal, Look Slimmer Instantly, Prom Night (a collaboration with artist Tamara Gonzales), and most recently, The Cheapskates. His poetry and criticism have appeared The Best American Poetry series, The Nation, Evergreen Review, Pleiades, Conjunctions, Rolling Stone, The Brooklyn Rail, Journal of Poetics Research and many others. Before moving to New York in the 80s, Sala and his spouse, poet Elaine Equi, did numerous readings together, helping to create Chicago’s lively performance poetry scene. He has worked for many corporations of all kinds as a professional copywriter and has a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University.”
“Espresso Bongo,” blog by Jerome Sala.
Photo Credit: Turtle Point Press
@book{sala2017corporations,
title={CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE TOO},
author={Sala, J.},
isbn={9781630450434},
url={https://books.google.com/books?id=Se5CMQAACAAJ},
year={2017},
publisher={NYQ BOOKS}
}
