A Jim Jarmusch documentary about Iggy Pop and The Stooges? YES.
Gimme Danger is scheduled for a limited release on October 28th.
Comments closedBooks, Design and Culture
A Jim Jarmusch documentary about Iggy Pop and The Stooges? YES.
Gimme Danger is scheduled for a limited release on October 28th.
Comments closedLast week, Iggy Pop delivered this year’s BBC Music John Peel Lecture on the topic of ‘Free Music in a Capitalist Society’ at Radio Festival 2014 in Salford:
I worked half of my life for free. I didn’t really think about that one way or the other, until the masters of the record industry kept complaining that I wasn’t making them any money. To tell you the truth, when it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge one unimportant detail. But, a good LP is a being, it’s not a product. It has a life-force, a personality, and a history, just like you and me. It can be your friend. Try explaining that to a weasel.
As I learned when I hit 30 +, and realized I was penniless, and almost unable to get my music released, music had become an industrial art and it was the people who excelled at the industry who got to make the art. I had to sell most of my future rights to keep making records to keep going. And now, thanks to digital advances, we have a very large industry, which is laughably maybe almost entirely pirate so nobody can collect shit. Well, it was to be expected. Everybody made a lot of money reselling all of recorded musical history in CD form back in the 90s, but now the cat is out of the bag and the new electronic devices which estrange people from their morals also make it easier to steal music than to pay for it. So there’s gonna be a correction.
You can read the complete transcript here, or listen to it (for the next couple of weeks at least) on the BBC’s iPlayer. You can also download it as a podcast for posterity.
Iggy Pop’s BBC Music John Peel Lecture 2014 mp3
Comments closedAccidental Effects — Rick Poynor on the street photography of designer Robert Brownjohn, at Design Observer:
Brownjohn tended to include enough of the setting to give a strong sense of the look and atmosphere of the place where he found the lettering or graffiti. The British capital’s dour post-war street texture was fascinating and meaningful to him. As an American and a recent arrival in London, he would have seen everything with the newcomer’s hungry and hypersensitive eye, whether the pictures were taken in a single day touring around town by taxi, as the story would have it, or in the course of several trips. Brownjohn shows the bricks, the stone, the doorways and window frames, the railings, the adjacent fixtures, the surrounding structure… [He] valued the accidental effects wrought by dilapidation, the elements, or human hands, in their own right, as a kind of visual music or poetry, irrespective of the formal design applications that these expressive details might go on to inspire.
Drowning in Film — Movie critic David Thomson, author most recently of The Big Screen, in conversation with Greil Marcus, at the LA Review of Books:
I have become more and more interested in the way different movies are like the water in a river. They’re constantly flowing into each other. Indeed, it’s a form that you can’t actually think of or describe as separate items. It’s the flow, it’s the sequence. And I think that we’re at a point in history where it’s not really as significant who makes what particular movies, it’s the constant flow. And like any flow of that kind, you say it’s like being carried down a river, and a lot of time perhaps you feel it’s on a sunny day and it’s very pleasant, but you can drown in a river. It seems that a lot of the culture, elements that I would hope to see maintained, are in danger of being drowned.
And finally…
Abnormal Activities — Patrick Ambrose interviews Iggy Pop for The Morning News:
Comments closedIggy Pop… obliterated the barrier between the artist and spectator. “I’m interested in being able to do that while maintaining the formality of the dinner engagement,” he says with a hearty laugh. “There has been a tremendous change in the cybernetics of rock and roll over the past 50 years. If you look back to the mid- to late-’50s, you’ve got maybe Elvis or Eddie Cochran playing on a flat-bed truck in a gas station parking lot with presumably 1,200 doomed teenagers dancing, chewing gum and knifing each other while religious leaders burn records and make racial slurs about the music. Now, you’ve got thousands of people obediently shuffling into these concrete civic centers to sponge up something in places where nothing really happens.”