“Breakdancing, also called breaking or b-boying/b-girling, is an athletic style of street dance originating from the African American communities in the United States. While diverse in the amount of variation available in the dance, breakdancing mainly consists of four kinds of movement: toprock, downrock, power moves and freezes. Breakdancing is typically set to songs containing drum breaks, especially in hip-hop, funk, soul music and breakbeat music, although modern trends allow for much wider varieties of music along certain ranges of tempo and beat patterns. The modern dance elements of breakdancing originated among the poor youth of New York during the early 1970s, where it was introduced as breaking. It is closely attributed to the birth of hip-hop, as DJs developed rhythmic breaks for dancers. …”
Wikipedia
exploring the birth of the b-boy in 70s new york
YouTube: The Birth of Hip Hop – Henry Louis Gates Jr., NEW YORK CITY BREAKERS OLD FOOTAGE
Month: February 2023
Patti Smith’s Eternal Flame
Platform at the 68th Street/Lexington subway station. Gerard Malanga took it in 1971.
“‘No matter what anybody thinks about any of them,’ said Patti Smith, ‘every record I’ve done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy. We never threw a record together. Each record was done really seriously, as if our life depended on it.’ In 1975, when Smith released her astonishing first album, Horses, she became the first member of the nascent CBGB crew to make it to vinyl, helping set a global revolution in motion. …”
Patti Smith’s Eternal Flame
Robert Miller Gallery: Patti Smith
NY Times: Rock Star Patti Smith, Making Paris Swoons
Voice – Patti Smith: Save This Rock and Roll Hero by Robert Christgau (1977)
[PDF] Patti Smith featured in the Janet Hamill Archive
Open Culture: Patti Smith’s Polaroids of Artifacts from Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Roberto Bolaño & More
Patti Smith, the Curator of Rock ‘N’ Roll (2011)
LitHub: The Moment When Punk Collided With Poetry
LitHub: Is It Still Punk When the Musician Makes It Big? by Vivien Goldman
Trash and Vaudeville
“Trash and Vaudeville is a store located at 96 East 7th Street between Avenue A and First Avenue in East Village in Manhattan, New York. The store is associated with the clothing styles of punk rock and various other counter culture movements, and has been a leading source of fashion inspiration since its inception by owner and founder Ray Goodman in 1975. Ray Goodman founded Trash & Vaudeville in 1975 at 4 Saint Marks Place, New York, NY. The store occupied two floors within the historic Hamilton-Holly House building on St. Mark’s Place from 1975 to February 2016. The basement formerly housed a pinball parlor directly below the upstairs, which was accessed by an iron staircase. Although physically separated as two stores, they were regarded as one entity. …”
Wikipedia
NY Times: Trash and Vaudeville, a Punk Emporium, Leaves Its East Village Home
The Way It Was: One Last Look at Trash & Vaudeville on St. Mark’s Place
NY Times: The Shop That Punk Built
Glenn Branca: A Guide to the Symphonies
“To most listeners, composer Glenn Branca is best known for his early engagements with the experimental side of rock history. Back in 1981, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo were two of the guitarists in the orchestra for the premiere of Branca’s Symphony No. 1, and since it was Branca’s own early ’80s imprint, Neutral, that originally released Sonic Youth’s first self-titled EP, the man has been subsumed within that band’s origin story for decades. … You have to give Branca credit for dedication: as of this writing, his website details 16 different symphonies. Of those, nine of his first 10 have received official recordings. (While Symphonies Nos. 11, 12, 14 and 15 remain in the ether, the Atavistic label has just issued Symphony No. 13 Hallucination City for 100 Guitars, and plans to issue the long-unreleased Symphony No. 4 later in 2016.) …”
Red Bull Music Academy (Video)
Glenn Branca symphonies (Video)
Discogs (Video)
Talking Heads – “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”
“I think the best love songs are simple. They’re simple because love isn’t, simple because we need to dream a little. Complexity, ambiguity, doubt—they can have their place in novels or in the movies. A love song lets you live in the fantasy of the absolute; maybe that’s also why they last only a couple of minutes. And that’s why we carry them with us, play and replay them until they wear out like old clothes. They stand for too much. I have many songs that mark the time of particular relationships, both their highs and the lows of their dissolution. I’ve played songs on repeat enough to drive people crazy, and I’ve locked myself in my room to listen to late-period Billie Holiday with the lights off. But I have only one renewable love song, which I’ve brought with me through all my relationships: the Talking Heads’ ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’ …”
The Paris Review
W – “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” 1983
YouTube: Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place)
The Passenger – Michelangelo Antonioni (1975)
“We Translate Every Experience into the Same Old Codes”: In Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger,’ Jack Nicholson Attempts a Transference of Self: “Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger is a languid thriller in which not much seems to happen, beautifully. The protagonist, David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a weary journalist chasing rebels in Chad, on a seeming whim swaps identities with a similar looking fellow traveler Robertson (Chuck Mulvehill) he finds dead from a heart attack in their dusty hotel, after their previous evening’s drinking. Locke seeks to leave his old life behind (‘I’ve run out of everything… Everything except a few bad habits I couldn’t get rid of.’), following a bread crumb trail of appointments in the other man’s diary across Europe, picking up a fellow passenger, ‘The Girl’ (Maria Schneider) along the way. He realizes the other man was an arms dealer for the rebels, and is expected to deliver weapons, for which he receives a handsome down payment. …”
Cinephilia & Beyond (Video)
Place Echoes Being: Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger
The Passenger: One Epic Shot (Video)
Wikipedia
amazon
YouTube: The Passenger | Trailer – Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider
Post-punk band Au Pairs: ‘The Thatcher years gave us plenty of material’
“Forty years ago this month, one of the best but often forgotten albums of the 1980s was released: Playing With a Different Sex by Birmingham band Au Pairs. The cover, an Eve Arnold photo showing female militia fighters heading into battle, is a good visual harbinger of the album’s friction-filled songs. Jane Munro’s monster basslines, Pete Hammond’s tight drum rhythms, and the jagged riffs of Lesley Woods and Paul Foad combine to form a tense backdrop for the myriad moods of Woods’ androgynous voice, singing songs that confront conformity and demand equality. …”
Guardian (Audio)
Overlay – Lucy R. Lippard (1983)
“… As the art world’s most outspoken feminist/socialist critic, Lucy R. Lippard has always gone against the tide, insisting emphatically on art with a message. She is deeply troubled by the fact that we live in an era that produces increasing numbers of artists who are without any sense of purpose beyond their own professional aims and that, as a culture, we seem to have lost any notion of what our art is for. If this situation raises a question most art critics try to avoid, it is one that gives special resonance to Miss Lippard’s writing, since what is at stake for her is nothing less than the reestablishing of connections among art, nature and society. …”
NY Times: ART SHOULD MEAN AS WELL AS BE
W – Lucy R. Lippard
[PDF] Overlay
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Tom Verlaine’s 15 Essential Songs
Television performs on stage at Hammersmith Odeon, London, 16 April 1978.
“Tom Verlaine was present at the creation of New York City punk. His band Television held a residency at CBGB in the club’s first years. But his music was never bound by what became punk’s ruling aesthetic of fast, loud and simplistic. Instead, Verlaine’s songs reveled in the open-ended: in improvisations that could spiral out toward free jazz and in verbal enigmas and paradoxes. Born Thomas Miller, Verlaine — who died on Saturday at 73 — renamed himself after a symbolist poet, Paul Verlaine, and he built his songs around guitar patterns that interlocked like cats’ cradles, intricate but never confining. His music looked back to the not-so-distant days of psychedelia and the Velvet Underground, but it was leaner, tauter, steelier. …”
NY Times (Video)
Remembering Tom Verlaine – James Wolcott
LitHub: Tom Verlaine was the Strand’s Best Customer
Lightning Struck Itself: Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’ in Eight Phases
Variety: Tom Verlaine, Founder of Influential Punk-Era Band Television, Dies at 73
NY Times: Tom Verlaine, Influential Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 73
One Day Pina Asked… – Chantal Akerman (1983)
“A fortuitous encounter between two icons of film and dance, Chantal Akerman and Pina Bausch, One Day Pina Asked… is Akerman’s singular look at the work of the remarkable choreographer and her Wuppertal Tanztheater during a five-week European tour. More than a conventional documentary, Akerman’s film is a journey through her world, composed of striking images and personal memories transformed. Capturing the company’s rehearsals and assembling performance excerpts from signature works such as Komm Tanz Mit Mir (Come Dance with Me, 1977) and Nelken (Carnations, 1982), the director applies her unique visual skills to bring us close to her enigmatic subject.”
Film Society of Lincoln Center
ARTFORUM: Save the Last Tanz
amazon
YouTube: “One Day Pina Asked…” (1983) Clip, Nelken, excerpt: The Man I Love
Punk Scrawled Artist 