June & July Music

Stevie roller skating

Billy Nicholls - Would You Believe?
Andrew Loog Oldham commissioned this album to be the British response to Pet Sounds. Only 100 copies hit the streets before label difficulties mothballed it.

Body Language - Falling Out

The Brothers Johnson - I'll Be Good To You // Land of Ladies

Clydie King & Brown Sugar - Dance to the Music

Doris - You Never Come Closer

Henry Lee Roberts - Halley's Comet (Dissolved)

The Jackson 5 - I Am Love

Larry Young - Turn Off the Lights

The Lat-Teens - African Twist // Now You Know

Quartetto Cetra - Crapa Pelada

Scott H. Biram - I See the Light/What's His Name?

The Makers - Don't Challenge Me

Todd Terje - Inspector Norse

Additionally:

This Boosh-y video:


Inside Led Zeppelin's private jet, 1973.

Cee Lo on American Dad:


Mr. Show's never released Rooms: The Musical:


A prequel mixtape to the forever delayed MF Doom / Ghostface Killah collaboration DOOMSTARKS.

This chopped and screwed midnight music video uses clips from Black Dynamite, Night on Earth, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Smiley Face, Death Wish, V, Dazed and Confused, Howard the Duck, Cruising, Danger: Diabolik, The Girlfriend Experience, Holy Mountain and 50 more I can't identify:


And lastly, Let My People Come: A Sexual Musical.

Truman Capote — Summer Crossing

What infinite energies are wasted steeling oneself against crisis that seldom comes: the strength to move mountains; and yet it is perhaps this very waste, this torturous wait for things that never happen, which prepares the way and allows one to accept with sinister sincerity the beast at last in view...

Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living. Unfortunately, one mirror is as treacherous as another, reflecting at some point in every adventure the same vain unsatisfied face, and so when she asks what have I done? she means really what am I doing? as one usually does.

In the Time of Your Life

“In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart.

Be the inferior of no man, or of any men be superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret.

In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.”

William Saroyan, The Time Of Your Life

ICP Highlights 7/29/12

[Check for two murders], 1939

Weegee
[Accident on upper roadway of Grand Central Station, New York], 1944

Weegee
Balcony seats at a murder
November 16, 1939

"Speaking of Pictures . . .," LIFE, April 12, 1937, pp. 8–9

Wonder Stories 1934–36

Via Golden Age Comic Book Stories. See Also.

Le Temps Retrouvé

Autograph manuscript of Proust's Le Temps Retrouvé with attached sheets of revisions

Something else I found in a book of old clippings. It looks like a Choose Your Own Adventure book being written. Speaking of, I just saw this tumblr collecting all the death pages from those books.

Ka-Boom!

Click to enlarge

Found this in a Heavy Metal magazine from the 80s. If I recall correctly, the World Trade Center was the command center of a fascist future government. See also DMZ.

Joseph Mitchell — Joe Gould's Secret

I read this years ago but just found a piece of paper in my attic with this passage jotted down from the days before blogger:

Suppose he had written the Oral History, I reflected: it probably wouldn't have been the great book he had gone up and down the highways and byways prophesying it would be at all — great books, even halfway great books, even good books, even halfway good books, being so exceedingly rare... Anyway, I decided, if there was anything the human race had a sufficiency of, a sufficiency and a surfeit, it was books, the Niagara of books, the rushing rivers of books, the oceans of books, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of books that were pouring off the presses of the world at that very moment, only a very few of which would be worth picking up and looking at, let alone reading. I began to feel that it was admirable that he hadn’t written it. One less book to clutter up the world, one less book to take up space and catch dust and go unread from bookstores to homes to second-hand bookstores and junk stores and thrift shops to still other homes to still other second-hand bookstores and junk stores and thrift shops to still other homes ad infinitum. 

Combine that sentiment with Hemingway's "There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done." and you'll see why my literary output has been so limited.

Thanks Bill! (And Neil)

Early July Tidbits

Via Yimmy's Yayo

I assumed Jean Touitou was some 70s French cultural intellectual but, oops, he's the founder and head designer of A.P.C.

I read today that ancient Mexicans (this was a very old book) considered the Milky Way the sister of the Rainbow. See previously.



Tom Waits just made a super-rare appearance on Letterman! He makes me so happy, aside from the vaguely sad feeling I get learning we were within a mile of each other...