Velvet Goldmine (1998) dir. Todd Haynes (Click on the image and you are there)
In 1984, journalist Arthur Stuart investigates the mysterious rise and fall of glam rock icon Brian Slade, a Bowie-esque figure who staged his own disappearance a decade earlier. As Arthur pieces together Slade’s story—his relationship with wild American rocker Curt Wild, his transformation into a glittering star, and his ultimate downfall—the film becomes a kaleidoscopic meditation on identity, fame, and reinvention.
Todd Haynes crafts a dazzling, surreal homage to the glam rock era, blending fictionalized history with mythic storytelling. The film’s striking visual style, inspired by 1970s glam culture, embraces bold colors, theatrical costumes, and dynamic cinematography. The soundtrack, featuring original and reinterpreted glam rock classics, amplifies the film’s electric, nostalgic atmosphere.
Beyond its extravagant aesthetic, Velvet Goldmine explores themes of artistic evolution, sexual fluidity, and the commodification of rebellion. The film blurs the line between reality and illusion, mirroring how icons are created and dismantled. Arthur’s journey reflects the bittersweet loss of youthful idealism, as he reconciles his past with the present.
Premiering at Cannes, where it won the Special Jury Prize for Artistic Contribution, Velvet Goldmine divided critics but gained a devoted cult following. It remains a defining queer rock opera and a love letter to the era that celebrated beauty, excess, and transformation.
The Witch's Cradle, sometimes billed as Witches' Cradle, is an unfinished, silent, experimental short film written and directed by Maya Deren, featuring Marcel Duchamp, and filmed in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery.
The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman (Pajorita Marta) and an elderly gentleman (Duchamp).
The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura.
The Witch's Cradle was written and directed by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. The film was developed at a comparison between surrealists' defiance of time and space and that of medieval magicians and witches. Daren developed the film over a period of one month, lasting from August to September 1943. However, long after principal photography for the film commenced, she abandoned the project, leaving the film incomplete. Some of the film's outtakes were found and stored at the Anthology Film Archives, while several sequences that were shot appear to be lost. Surviving shots from the film are mostly semi-edited sequences, including one particular sequence that Deren had engineered during post-production to be played backwards.
In her essay taken from her dissertation for her doctorate at The University of Southern California,
“So I Would Move Among These Things: Maya Deren and “The Witch’s Cradle,” Fox Henry Frazier revives
the important legacy and cultural importance of Ukrainian-born, avant-garde poet and filmmaker Maya Deren,
who died too young of a brain hemorrhage in 1961. Frazier’s analysis of Deren’s filmic semiotics reminds
present day readers not only of Deren’s groundbreaking work as a filmmaker in the nineteen forties and fifties,
but her poetic genius as well for creating memorable surrealistic imagery in both her poetry and films. By
documenting Deren’s particular brilliance for converting a torturous, misogynistic ritual called “The Witch’s
Cradle” at the hand of the writer and “adventurer” William Seabrook, Frazier explains just how Deren
ingeniously converted her torturous experience with Seabrook into her own visionary feminist film starring
Marcel Duchamp under the same title, thus not only exposing Seabrook’s ritual for his thinly disguised enactment
of one of his perverse sexual fantasies in the guise of witch-training for broom-riding, but co-opting it
as her own with a far superior philosophical conceit for betraying the complexity of the feminine psyche via
the symbolic use of string. “Deren’s interest in the power of objects may feed into bigger questions triggered
by the Rhinebeck episode,” Frazier writes, “questions, for example, about bodily/embodied autonomy for
female and femme people, and subject-versus-object power within that context…We might ask,” she goes on
to suggest, “whether there is an implication here that, if these objects have subjectivity and agency, then perhaps even a woman who has been reduced to an object, in a violent way, might then more easily be able to envision herself possessing subjectivity and agency—even if that, too, must be achieved by supernatural or occult means, i.e., witchiness.” –Chard DeNiord
The year is 1939; Nazi Germany has recently invaded Poland, and many small towns and villages have already become victims of the German raid. A regiment of Nazi soldiers arrive upon a small church nestled in the sprawling wheat fields surrounding the small town of Leczyca. As they enter the church grounds, a low-ranking soldier is ordered into the catacombs deep beneath the church to search for valuables and items of historical and cultural significance for appropriation. Reluctantly, the young soldier heads down, and discovers he has been tainted by the stolen goods, further building the Legend of Boruta.
Inner city Sydney in the 1980s and 90s was a very special place. I first spent extended amounts of time in Newtown from 1991. The creativity and energy of the community was amazing. Music, art, performance and writing as well as dancing, singing, sculpting and raving were happening everywhere. Large loft-style warehouse spaces could be rented for a few hundred dollars a week and large groups could live in them too. I moved permanently to Sydney in late 1992 and the city was my base late 1999. The city has changed a lot since then and on my first and only visit back since, in 2023, it was almost unrecognisable.
This is the story of Bryan Cook. A local inner city photographer and Australian independent music lover who captured some of the most unique, unseen photos around the inner city pubs like The Hopetoun, The Vulcan, The Sydney Trade Union Club The Evening star, The Strawberry Hills Hotel and more.
His love of film and digital photography inadvertently captured a music scene that was never given a lot of attention or documented by the mainstream press. Dr Gregory Ferris, an esteemed academic from the UTS, discovered Cookie's extensive, extraordinary and rarely seen photos and exhibited them at the Powerhouse Museum in an interactive display that recreated the Hopetoun Hotel. Cookie has confirmed that the total number of photographs taken over the years exceeded 80,000, a monumental achievement.
This video was the concept of Ed Garland and Nick Bleszynski, who were determined to expose to the world the amazing photography of Bryan (Cookie) Cook and his accidental documentation of a unique time in Australian music history.
Interviews:
Clyde Bramley (Hoodoo Gurus)
Jon Roberts (The Barbarellas)
Geoff Datson (Samurai Trash)
Susie Beauchamp (Box the Jesuit)
Dr Gregory Ferris (UTS Academic)
Ed Garland (Waxworks)
Credit to Nick Bleszynski for footage at the Moshpit Newtown and the scene with Dr Ferris.
My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn as fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. The film's dialogue covers topics such as experimental theater, the nature of theater, and the nature of life, and contrasts Andre's spiritual experiences with Wally's modest humanism.
Twenty-four hours straight of live experimentation and improvisation, featuring experimental/noise/drone bands and artists from the Bay Area and beyond. A KZSU tradition since the '90s; this is the 20th Day of Noise. Listen in on 90.1 FM in the Bay Area and https://kzsulive.stanford.edu around the world.
Part I (12am-12pm)
Part II (12pm-12am) https://www.youtube.com/live/BqVmpZ7tyvU
The LAFMS have created a huge collection of homemade musical instruments throughout their history. A large selection of these objects will be on display in the space, exposing their playful and ingenious approach to sound. The selection on display includes both historical and new instruments made by Rick Potts, Tom Recchion, Joe Potts, Joseph Hammer and others. Rick Potts’ Hinge Neck Guitars, Tom Recchion’s “Strunagaphone” and Spring Boards, Joe Potts’ Chopped Optigan, and Paul McCarthy’s Sonotubes will be among the plethora of functional sculptural objects included. Films by John Duncan, Michael Intriere, Doug Henry, Tom Recchion, Rick Potts, Jonathon Rosen, Janie Geiser and more will be screened. A “record store” ala Poo-Bah Records, a scene of the early development of the LAFMS, will offer CDs, Vinyl, Cassettes and other objects for sale. A non-linier, historical, wall-sized collage of flyers, drawings, notes, correspondence, photos and other ephemera will also be on display.
Another focal point of the exhibition will be a major collection of photographs taken by Fredrik Nilsen. Nilsen, now a well-known exhibition and art photographer, will show prints documenting the LAFMS between 1972 and 1981. These images that have been printed especially for this exhibition, portray the beginning of this pivotal movement. Photographs documenting this vast scene by Tom Recchion, Kevin Laffey, Dennis Duck, and others will also be shown.
Brief History-
The foundation of the Los Angeles Free Music Society goes back to 1973 when Rick Potts, Joe Potts, and Chip Chapman—began making tape experiments and improvised music mixed from TV cartoons and material appropriated from Chapman’s eccentric record collection. A year later, with Tom Potts and Susan Farthing- Chapman they formed Le Forte Four. In Pasadena they became acquainted with Tom Recchion who worked at Poo-Bah Records and kept locals informed of new experimental and avant-garde records. Concurrently at Poo-Bah’s, late night improvised music experiments were taking place in the back room, with Tom and customers-now friends Dennis Duck, the Ace of Space, The Professor, Fredrik Nilsen, Juan Gomez and Harold Schroeder. Out of those sessions Tom and Harold formed The Two Who Do Duets, and went on to form the Doo-Dooettes with the inclusion of Fredrik, Juan and Dennis. It was only a short while later that the factions joined forces under the LAFMS moniker when it became obvious that there was a symbiosis to their approach and aesthetics, as well as strength in numbers. Ace Farren Ford, also affiliated with Poo-Bah, was part of Ace and Duce, also joined the ranks and the first LAFMS concert was produced in 1975 featuring Le Forte Four, the Doo-Dooettes and Ace and Duce, billed as The Los Angeles Free Music Society. Members of the avant-rock group Smegma, who had already been in existence since 1973, also developed out of and beyond the Poo-Bah Records scene before moving to Portland, Oregon in 1975. John Duncan, another Poo-Bah customer and subsequent acquaintance of Tom’s became part of the collective, releasing several of his earliest recordings as part of the LAFMS canon. AIRWAY, Joe Potts’s project and one of the first “noise” bands, emerged spurring on the development of “noise as art” aesthetic, becoming a global influential force and the idea of “maxmimalism.” Influenced by everything from Zappa/Beefheart to Cage, Terry Riley and One String Sam, they were ahead of the curve and their DIY aesthetic presaged Punk Rock, releasing their own efforts and self-produced concerts.
This was only the beginning. As years went on many groups and affiliations began to spring up and each member of the LAFMS began to emerge as solo artist in both visual arts and musical fields as well as collaborate and join other groups.
LAFMS’s work and performances have been pivotal figures in L.A.’s history of experimental art and sound and have had a global impact with international recognition. They are not simply a NOISE group, but embrace all forms of music and have demonstrated an adept capacity for tonal, improvised music, sound art, rock, musique- concrete, “turntablism”, humor, drone, minimalism, etc.
Since 1975, the LAFMS has released over 25 recordings on their own label and participants have released or have appeared on hundreds of releases from labels around the world. A merchandise store with some of these releases will operate throughout the exhibition, where visitors can find in-print and rare out-of-print items available for purchase including a new 2012 edition of “Lightbulb”, an occasional magazine published between 1977—1981 by the LAFMS.
A few infamous quotes about LAFMS
“Free ears and minds are one thing, but what about aesthetics?”—Hal Clark, Electronic Music Festival Hovikkoden, Norway (1974)
“For decades, [the LAFMS] has influenced literally dozens of free-improv weirdos and avant-garde musician/non-musician types—who in turn have influenced thousands of others.”—LA Weekly (2011)
“A bunch of Hoodlums!”--- Director of Pilot Theatre, LA 1977 (upon canceling a show by AIRWAY and the Doo-Dooettes)
When modern artists embrace her forgotten album “Just Another Diamond Day,” failed U.K. folk singer Vashti Bunyan experiences popularity like never before. This documentary profiles her disappointing career and astonishing resurgence 30 years later. Featuring interviews with Andrew Loog Oldham, Joe Boyd and Robert Kirby, this charming movie follows Bunyan as she takes a nostalgic road trip and prepares for the biggest concert of her life.
The armies of the Adolph Hitler's Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 at the height of World War II. Mobile commandos, the Einsatzgruppen, followed their advance to Stalingrad with the mission of eliminating all Jewish people on the conquered territories. From June 1941 and the end of 1943, these Nazi groups killed close to two million Jews from the Baltic countries to the Black Sea.
00:00 - EP1 - Mass graves (June-August 1941)
Explore in depth the history of the Nazi mobile death squads, including when, how and why they were created.
43:46 - EP2 - Judenfrei (September-December 1941)
A recollection of the actions of Einsatzgruppen in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Baltic states. Due to them, in December 1941 these areas were declared "free of Jews".
01:29:30 - EP3 - The stakes (1942-1943)
As Soviet forces advance, Nazi Germany has the bodies of death-camp victims dug up and burned.
02:08:57 - EP4 - Reckonning (1943-1947)
The series finale recalls the Nuremberg trials. Some faced the ultimate punishment, but many walked free in the 1950s.
Written : Michaël Prazan
Directed : Michaël Prazan
KUIV Production
If there is any doubt about the veracity and deep unimaginable horror that was the Holocaust, watch Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads. It is hard work to watch it. The scale and visciousness of what was done by a state to so many millions is hard to comprehend. There is plenty of evidence to consider and everyone should be aware of it. Genocide is still happening today and there is no excuse for this being so.
I watched this last night. It is harrowing, to say the least. The three months the people of Mariupol endured under horrific attack by Russia is a chronicle of human suffering on a terrible scale. Click on the image above to witness hell on earth.
Mixed with the testimonies of a dozen survivors, most of them young women, terrible scenes retrace from the inside the siege of Mariupol, a large port in southeastern Ukraine on the Sea of Azov, from the start of the Russian invasion on February 24 to the surrender of the last combatants entrenched in the Azovstal metallurgical complex on May 21. According to the Ukrainian authorities' estimate, some 25,000 civilians died during these three months of indiscriminate shelling and firing by the Russian army, which also destroyed almost the entire city of 430,000 inhabitants, which was then surrounded and almost cut off from the world.
