#anglo american artist

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) "Portrait of Mrs. Theodore Atkinson Jr." (1765) Oil on canvas Located in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, United States Frances Deering Wentworth (1745–1813) was born into a wealthy and well-connected family. She married her cousin Theodore Atkinson in 1762. In 1767 it was rumored she was having an affair with another of her cousins, John Wentworth, while her husband suffered from consumption. Theodore died October 28, 1769, and was soon buried. Fueling the rumor mill, Frances and John wed the following week. In June 1775, on the brink of the American Revolutionary War, the Wentworths fled New Hampshire for England. Eventually they settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with John as lieutenant governor. Supposedly, Frances hated her life in Nova Scotia, and had an affair with Prince William. When John found out about the affair, he was not upset with her, but he did write to King George III, William's father, and William was called back to England. She is depicted with her pet flying squirrel.

#paintings #art #artwork #genre painting #female portrait #john singleton copley #oil on canvas #fine art #art gallery #anglo american artist #portrait of a woman #clothing #clothes #silver dress #dresses #green cape #squirrels #animals #history #love affair #extra marital affair #william iv #jewelry #jewellery #1760s #mid 1700s #mid 18th century

[pagansphinx]

George Henry Boughton (Anglo-American, 1833-1905) • The Lady of the Snows • 1896 • Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, United Kingdom

#art #painting #fine art #art history #george henry boughton #anglo-american artist #paintings of women #oil painting #artwork #pagan sphinx art blog #portrait #art blog #19th century art #british art #winter #snowy day #cold weather #winter time

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Toni Braxton - You're Makin' Me High 1996

Toni Michele Braxton is an American R&B singer, songwriter, actress and television personality. She has sold over 70 million records worldwide and is one of the best-selling female artists in history. Braxton has won seven Grammy Awards, nine Billboard Music Awards, seven American Music Awards, and numerous other accolades. In 2011, Braxton was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. In 2017 she was honored with the Legend Award at the Soul Train Music Awards.

"You're Makin' Me High" is the lead single from her second studio album, Secrets (1996). The mid-tempo song represents a joint collaboration between the Grammy Award-winning producer Babyface and Bryce Wilson. The beat of the song was originally for singer-songwriter Brandy, with Dallas Austin pegged to write a lyric to override; however, Braxton had Babyface write lyrics for the song. It was ultimately issued in the US as a double A-side with "Let It Flow", the airplay hit from the 1995 film Waiting to Exhale.

"You're Makin' Me High" became Braxton's first number-one single on both the US Billboard Hot 100 and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts; it remained on top for one week on the former and for two weeks on the latter, eventually going Platinum. A remix by David Morales with re-recorded vocals allowed the single to also top the Dance Club Songs chart for two weeks in August 1996.

The song earned Braxton her third Grammy Award for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance in 1997. The success of "You're Makin' Me High" would later be continued with the release of the smash hit "Un-Break My Heart", which peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 consecutive weeks, while topping the charts in several other countries.

"You're Makin' Me High" was sampled for Method Man & Redman's 2001 song "Part II", from the How High soundtrack. In 2014, Anglo-American producer/DJ Secondcity sampled a part of the song's bridge for the main hook of his UK number-one single "I Wanna Feel".

The accompanying music video for "You're Makin' Me High", directed by Bille Woodruff, features Braxton and a group of friends consisting of actresses Erika Alexander, Vivica A. Fox, and Tisha Campbell-Martin.

"You're Makin' Me High" received a total of 60,2% yes votes!

#finished #high votes #high yes #low reblog #90s #toni braxton

[filmnoirsbian]

Things Read in March

Essays & Articles:

Reader Discretion Advised: On profanity and the sublime in poetry

Bizarre Movie Monsters: Skinamarink

Penelope and the Poetics of Remembering

Two Bad Mormons

Was Caroline Ellison a Main Character or the Fall Girl? How the 28-year-old CEO LARP-ed her way into the collapse of FTX

The 'real Lord of the Flies': a survivor's story of shipwreck and salvation

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

The Legacy of Hoodoo Within the Black Church

'Hellraiser' writer Clive Barker on the publishing industry's homophobia and J.K. Rowling

'Ma' Reconsidered

Exposed: Dallas Humber, Narrator Of Neo-Nazi ‘Terrorgram,’ Promoter Of Mass Shootings

Black Horror Films Found Off the Beaten Path

'The Help' Spawns A Lawsuit And A Question: How Much Borrowing Is Fair?

Pentagon Blocks Sharing Evidence of Possible Russian War Crimes With Hague Court

How Wasps Are Less Bothersome—And More Beautiful—Than We Think

Researchers Pinpoint Important Biomarker for SIDS

15 Years After Invasion of Iraq, Amnesia & Distortion Obscure U.S. Record of War Crimes & Torture

The rabid sexualisation of male actors is getting creepy

Calvinism and the American Conception of Evil

The Schedule of Loss

Poetry:

Fuck Stuck by Naomi Morris

The Artist by Jenny George

Jenner, CA by Jay Deshpande

[11. Violence: Anglo-Linguistic] by Nam Le

Blue by Laura Villareal

T Shot #9: Ode to My Sharps Container by KB Brookins

The Bag of Skunk and the Ghetto Bank by Yahya Hassan translated by Jordan Barger

Fable of the Barn by Ann Lauterbach

"Envoi" of William H. Johnson's "Nude" by Terrance Hayes

Ancestors' wildest dreams by Kinsale Drake

Short Stories & Books:

In The Deep Woods; The Light is Different There by Seanan McGuire

Bones & All by Camille DeAngelis

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

DCeased

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

#tcp #an open window #essays #articles #poetry

[aristotels]

I would love to hear an extended rant about being an artist in a periphery country, if you're willing to say more.

sorry for this being late! but yes there are quite a few things to this.

1) EDUCATION/JOB OFFERINGS

when you are from a periphery country, the art education accessible to you is much worse than in the imperial core. yes, i know, you dont need to go to art school, you can be self-taught, you dont need a degree, but art school is about making potential job connections. in a country like croatia, you do not have access to those connections. you do not have ability to go out, show your portfolio, get reccommended by a professor for a listing. the education is stunted as well - the animation program here is atrocious, my building had an attic with dead pigeon corpses littering the room, there are no drawing tablets, computers are old, the building is leaking, but the lack of ability to make professional connections is the main concern.

also, your degree? people hear you got a degree from a balkans land and you are immediately less worthy in their eyes. your name, which is not anglo? crossed out, despite your skills. job offerings within your country? good luck, everyone lives in poverty, you are underpaid, and studios hiring can be named on fingers of one hand. you are left with earning online.

and you are left with earning illegally. making author contracts with pdv, taxes, etc is incredibly complicated when working over upwork, doing commissions etc. this does constitute as black market. we do not hand in our taxes like in the usa, theyre deducted from our salaries and contracts immediately. this means you are missing out on potential grants and statuses which require you to provide papers of your commissions. it also means that transfering money over paypal has to go into small amounts to your own account, to avoid suspicious activity.

2) ART TOOLS ACCESIBILITY

a thing that is very frustrating. living in a periphery country? good luck getting anything. art shops are scarce. art shops do not carry the same amounts of items, and they are more expensive than in their mother countries. you are left with office supply stores. the quality of accessible paints and other tools is lower. its already been proven that products shipped to eastern europe are of lower quality and higher price than in the west; and this goes for paints too.

this means that, if you do traditional art of any kind, you are left with shopping online. this includes shipping - youre in a periphery country? congrats, often it does not ship to it, or the shipping is atrocious. your choices? mostly deutschland amazon - every item has 10€ shipping minimum. prices are not adjusted to your salary, they are adjusted to the german ones, which are much higher. i have to regularly order fillings for my brushpen. it is not available in my country. the price on amazon is significantly higher than on pentel website, and their usa based shipping. yes, just the price of the product. pentel does not ship this to my country btw. aliexpress is what you have, it takes 2 months to arrive, is frequently lost in mail, and even with it being cheaper - its still a bit more expensive than the original.

3) ALGORITHM, SOCIAL MEDIA

this is the third thing - algorithm works against you if you are not from the imperial core. of course, there are timezones, but also - your posts tend to be shown to people who live around you; meaning you have harder time breaking into the international market, and that market is the only viable one.

4) BEING PAID LESS

being eastern european (or asian or southern american or african or...) gets you lower salary. i indeed love my employers, i adore the comic i work on so much that its become my own project as well, theyve been nothing but kind to me - but the fact remains that i, as an eastern european, am and will always be paid much less than my usamerican counterparts.

5) JOB OPPORTUNITIES, ONCE AGAIN, ENGLISH LANGUAGE

adding this but: its hard to break into cartoon network/adult swim/etc without being presently there. you cannot get to conventions, you cannot have your portfolio checked, and you must speak english. yes. anglos take english-speaking for granted, and fail to realize that actually speaking english for us is not a privilege, its a necessity, and its a tool of imperialism. it is unfair that you cannot do ANYTHING without speaking english. you cannot get jobs, you cannot advance your career, and while i personally speak english quite well, not everyone does, not everyone should have to.

anyway sorry for the length

#txt #artists on tumblr #eastern europe #imperialism #usa imperialism #marxism #marxist leninist #socialism #communism #ask

[antonio-m]

“The Cricket player”, c.1900 by James Jebusa Shannon (1862-1923). Anglo-American artist. Private collection. oil on canvas

[get-back-homeward]

By macabre coincidence an event that took place around Bristol marks a major turning point in the story of pop music. Eddie Cochran died hours after appearing at the Bristol Hippodrome in 1960, as part of the Larry Parnes-produced Anglo-American rock ’n’ roll package tour. Two of the people who shared a stage with Cochran that night were Tony Sheridan and a Liverpudlian singer called Johnny Gentle. Both were under contract to Parnes and both would play a significant role in the history of the most influential British act of all time, the Beatles. Sheridan, the first British rock ’n’ roller to sing and play his own guitar live on British TV, would become best known for the recordings he made in Hamburg with the Beatles shortly before they found fame.

Parnes was the first manager in Britain to become as famous as his artists – the Simon Cowell of his day – with a stable of singers including Tommy Steele, Britain’s first real rock ’n’ roll star, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Vince Eager and others. He was also homosexual, a dangerous thing to be at a time when gay men were routinely arrested, fined or even imprisoned.

Their tour was due to take a break after a week of shows in Bristol, and Cochran and co-headliner Gene Vincent wanted to get home to America. Cochran was in a hurry to get to London, where he was going to meet up with Vince Eager before the pair flew to the States together, and Cochran and Vincent rented a private hire taxi, driven by George Martin from Hartcliffe, to take them. Shortly after 11pm on 16 April 1960, their car set off from Bristol’s Royal Hotel (now the Bristol Marriott Royal, on College Green) for London Airport.

Sadly, none of the passengers would make their flight. Less than an hour out of Bristol, Martin realised he had taken a wrong turn. On Rowden Hill, a notorious accident black spot near Chippenham, he lost control and the car spun backwards, hitting a lamppost. The impact of the crash sent Cochran up into the roof of the car and forced the rear passenger side door open, throwing him onto the road. Martin and tour manager Patrick Thompkins, who were in the front of the vehicle, were able to walk away uninjured. The three passengers who had occupied the back seat – Eddie, Gene and Eddie’s girlfriend Sharon Sheeley – were lying on the grass verge. All three were rushed to Chippenham Cottage Hospital, before being transferred to St Martin’s Hospital, just outside Bath. Vincent had broken his collarbone, Sheeley was badly bruised and concussed, but Cochran was seriously injured and would not regain consciousness: he died in hospital in Bath the following day. A young police cadet, David Harman, was among those called to help clear the scene after the crash. Harman would later find fame as Dave Dee, front man of the hit group Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

Three weeks after Cochran’s death, Larry Parnes auditioned the Beatles to act as the backing group to his big signing, Billy Fury. They did not win that booking, but he hired them to play with Johnny Gentle on a short tour of Scotland. All of the Beatles were fans of Cochran and Vincent, and lapped up Gentle’s tales of life on the road with the two big American stars. When the 17-year-old George Harrison discovered that Gentle owned the shirt that Cochran had worn on stage in Bristol for that last show he begged the singer to give it to him.

Excerpt from Darryl W. Bullock's book The Velvet Mafia in The Bristol Magazine [x]

#the velvet mafia #1960 #eddie cochran #gene vincent #i keep forgetting gene vincent was in the car with cochran #totally missed how close this was to the scottish tour #larry parnes #scotland #johnny gentle #precedent for paul asking for little richards shirt #guess they didnt find fans wanting any piece of textile they every touched was weird if they did it lol #bug influences #may 1960 #newspaper clippings #learning gene vincent was from norfolk va and he was so rough looking they put him in leather to lean into it #cochran ends up picking up the leather pants look that spring #he'd just made a splash wearing them on brit tv #the last photo taken of cochran hes in those black leather pants #(top right) #the beatles end up getting a tailor to make pairs that look identical by spring 1961 #probably inspired by tony sheridan who had a gene vincent act #gene vincent plays at the star club with them in spring 62 #john and pete talk about him being obsessed with his knives and paul has a story of gene pulling out a gun

[hplovecraftmuseum]

Lovecraft and animals, Part 7: Snakes - Snakes did not become particularly important in Lovecraft's tales until fairly late in his career (since Lovecraft considered himself a gentleman amateur 'man of letters', using the term 'career' might have been distasteful for him). The 'Father of all serpents' first appeared in his ghost writing/revision work. THE CURSE OF YIG and THE MOUND, both featured references to 'Yig'. Though there was some uncertainty as to who really coined the name (Lovecraft or his client) in his letters to other writer friends Lovecraft claimed that he himself came up with the name and concept of Yig. Yig is never actually featured in any Lovecraft story in the same way as Great Cthulhu. We do not get a detailed discription of him either. We might assume that since the stories that carry his name most abundantly are connected to the American West and it's pre - Anglo inhabitants that Yig is perhaps the original entity around which all First Nations Snake-God myths were born. The Aztec diety Quetzalcoatl would be a prime example. A snake-like bundle of hair that can move about even after it is cut from a woman's head shows up in the particularly dreadful tale, MEDUSA'S COIL. Lovecraft penned this abomination for Zealia Bishop but the story did not see publication until after his death. (1940. Weird Tales) Of all Lovecraft works written for clients seeking to develop a career as professional writers, MEDUSA'S COIL has got to be one of the most rediculous! Still, Lovecraft injects references to Cthulhu - called Clooloo here, as well as Shub-Niggurath and R'lyeh. Interestingly Lovecraft also makes mention here of the author of the fabled book, Les Chants de Maldoror, also known as Maldoror by a young Frenchman who called himself 'Comte de Lautremont'. Les Chants de Maldoror was written between 1868 and 1869 and was highly influential for the Surrealist School of artists and poets of the 1930s. Lovecraft admitted in letters that he had read parts of Maldoror on several occasions. HPL also knew of Salvador Dali's early works. Apparently Lovecraft was not particularly impressed with Surrealism in general, however. Lastly Lovecraft makes a passing reference to 'the serpent-men of Valusia in one of his later tales. This brief mention was a tip of the hat to Lovecraft's writer pal, Robert E. Howard. Howard and Lovecraft never met, but they corresponded by mail for many years until Howard's death by suicide on June 11, 1936. Howard is best known today for his virtual 'invention' of the Sword and Sorcery genre of imaginative writing. He was the creator of the famed barbarian King, Conan. Lovecraft made mention of a number of his writer friend's fictitious gods and monsters as his own mock mythology/cosmic religion developed, most importantly Clark Ashton Smith's whom Lovecraft admired greatly. (Exhibit 415)

#lovecraft #lovecraft and snakes #Robert E. Howard #Yig

[aeltri]

• Victim of organized pedophilia at Stoke Mandeville seeks treatment years after Satanist abuse.

• One of these 'Stoke Mandeville' pedophiles, Michael Salmon, turns out to be friends with Miriam Rothschild, so much so that she wrote a preface for his book after he was convicted.

• Victim, at only 14 years old, gets taken in by Tavistock Clinic for extended studies.

• Victim exhibits symptoms of Monarch mind control in her paintings, as well as Dissociative Identity Disorder. Her identity splitting is so strong that, even as a non-artist, she manages to paint in 13 different artistic styles.

• Meanwhile, pedophile and Miriam Rothschild collaborate on art brut and butterfly collection, the art collection linked to an actual Illuminati building in Switzerland.

• Tavistock is the world's best knowledge source for Dissociative Identity Disorder at this point.

• Through ties to sister organization called The Wellcome Trust, key funding source for mental health research at clinic turns out to be Miriam Rothschild.

• Art Brut expert Micheline Klagsbrun, a Tavistock-educated psychiatrist who studied art therapy practices at Tavistock, runs the CrossCurrents foundation, one of the primary funders of the Transformer Gallery in Washington DC, run by local restaurateur James Alefantis.

• Tavistock is linked to both Stoke Mandeville and the Comet Ping Pong ring, on top of other links to Anglo-American establishments through Folger, Sackler families.

#tavistock #rothschilds #sacklers #comet ping pong #kim noble #mkultra #monarch programming #pizzagate

[mywifeleftme]

211: Erkin Koray // Arap Saçı

Arap Saçı Erkin Koray 2021, Pharaway Sounds

Pharaway Sounds’ Arap Saçı (Arab Hair) collects 24 Erkin Koray tracks originally issued as singles between 1968 and 1976. Koray is best known in the West for his groundbreaking fusion of Anatolian/Arabic folk and classical with crunching psychedelic rock on his 1974 debut LP Elektronik Türküler. However, as Angela Sawyer’s tart liner notes observe, Turkey was predominantly a singles market at the time, and back home Koray did most of his damage on 7”. The limitations of the format, and the preferences of Koray’s record company, preclude the kind of long-form acid voyages he undertook on Elektronik Türküler, but he's able to generate plenty of smoke on these “pop” singles.

Highlights abound. Arap Saçı kicks off with 1973’s “Mesafaler” (“Distances”), a scorching psych banger complete with cowbell that only stops rocking to periodically gawp and stare fixedly into space for 20 or 30 seconds at a time before shaking itself awake to get back to business. (Is there footage of a Turkish TV performance featuring liquid light art? You bet your hairy ass there is.)

The waltzing, organ and hand drum-led “Komşu Kızı” (“Girl Nextdoor”) is a classic melancholy Middle Eastern ballad that hides a wild, surprising drop two-thirds of the way through; Koray freaks “Aşka İnanmıyorum” (“I Do Not Believe in Love”) with his insinuating croon and serpentine guitar licks; “Istemem” (“I Do Not Want”) mixes a light-stepping folk beat with some stinging solos that aren’t too far off what Uli Jon Roth would get up to in Germany with Scorpions a few years later. There really isn’t a bum track to be found.

This new compilation covers much of the same ground as the ‘70s Erkin Koray (AKA Mesafaler) and Erkin Koray 2 (AKA Şaşkın) singles compilations, and Pharaway Sounds opts to follow their track sequencing as closely as possible—a good choice, as they had a great flow, though a bit frustrating for those hoping to track Koray’s musical development chronologically. Regardless, we know that Koray was exposed to Western music as a young age, learning Occidental classical music on the piano as a child and discovering rock ‘n’ roll as a teen. According to the liners, Koray was performing songs by Elvis, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis in the late ‘50s, and by the late ‘60s, when he began to emerge as a recording artist, he’d clearly imbibed industrial quantities of Hendrix, Cream, and the other usual psychonauts.

In a previous review, I briefly contrasted Koray with Egypt’s Omar Khorshid, a fellow guitar god and contemporary pioneer in electrified Arabic music. Khorshid had some familiarity with Western pop music, but he was working with the top stars in Arab folk and classical, using electric instruments to push traditional Eastern music forward rather than to fuse it with rock. Koray on the other hand was a long-haired freak who claims to have fought in the streets with a knife and joined Anglo-American-inspired combos with names like Mustard (Hardal) and Sweat (Ter). By the late ‘60s rock had become popular in Turkey, as had Arabesk music, which Sawyer describes as “a purposely uncouth… appropriation of Arabic pop and folk, popular with rural or marginalized folks who were suddenly encountering pockets of urbanized Europe in their backyard.” Koray intuitively crossbred the invasive genre (rock) with the reactionary one (Arabesk) and found himself one of the fathers of a powerful new mongrel breed of psych music.

By reissuing both Elektronik Türküler and these essential singles, Pharaway Sounds has done a real service to psych and non-Western rock aficionados. Koray makes a great gateway to the other masters of ‘70s Anatolian folk-rock, including Selda, Moğollar, and Barış Manço, a loose affiliation of artists that has been one of my most prized discoveries of recent years.

211/365

#erkin koray #turkish music #turkish rock #turkish psych #anatolian rock #anatolian psych #anatolian music #psych rock #heavy psych #psychedelia #'70s music #'60s music #pharaway sounds #music review #vinyl record #arab hair

[justforbooks]

Ryuichi Sakamoto was not a man cut out to be a pop star. As a teenager, he liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but his abiding passion was New York’s underground avant garde art scene – Joseph Beuys, Fluxus, Andy Warhol – and its accompanying experimental music: he was fond of pointing out to interviewers that he was born the year that John Cage composed 4’33. At university, he studied the work of modern composers Boulez, Stockhausen and Ligeti; he had a particular interest in the challenging electronic compositions of Iannis Xenakis. The first album to bear Sakamoto’s name, 1975’s Disappointment/Hateruma, was a collaboration with percussionist Toshiyuki Tsuchitori that consisted entirely of free improv. If he was going to have a role in the Japanese pop world at all, it was in the background, using his keyboard skills and interest in the fast-developing world of synthesizers to find employment as a session musician.

But a pop star was exactly what Sakamoto became, at least for a time. A 1978 session for singer Haruomi Hosono led to the suggestion that they should form a band with drummer Yukihiro Takahashi. Yellow Magic Orchestra went on to become both the biggest band in Japan – inspiring a degree of paparazzi attention and screaming fervour among fans that Sakamoto seems to have loathed every minute of – and the first Japanese artists to find more than novelty or cult status in the west.

Yellow Magic Orchestra were successful, but they were groundbreaking too. The convenient shorthand was that they were the Japanese Kraftwerk, although in truth, YMO didn’t really sound like Kraftwerk at all. Alongside the synthesizers, they used guitars, bass and acoustic drums. They were more straightforwardly aligned to disco: their debut album even featured an electronic version of the deathless “ooah ooah” whoop from the Michael Zager Band’s Let’s All Chant. You could detect the influence of jazz fusion and, later, the UK’s ongoing ska revival. Like Throbbing Gristle, they appeared fascinated by the kitschy 1950s exotica of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, which had featured traditional Japanese instruments and quasi-“oriental” melodies; Yellow Magic Orchestra’s biggest international hit was a version of Denny’s 1959 track Firecracker.

Equally, you could see why the Kraftwerk comparison stuck. Both bands shared an obsession with technology – Yellow Magic Orchestra were pioneering in their use of sequencers and samplers and they introduced the world to the sound of the Roland TR-808 drum machine – and a belief that being cutting-edge experimentalists didn’t preclude them from writing fantastic pop songs. The Sakamoto-penned Behind the Mask, from 1979’s Solid State Survivor, was covered by Michael Jackson, ostensibly for inclusion on Thriller, although it was dropped from the final tracklisting; it was eventually turned into a UK hit by, of all people, Eric Clapton.

Both YMO and Kraftwerk were interested in the detournement of Anglo-American pop: just as Kraftwerk borrowed from the Beach Boys on Autobahn, so YMO covered the Beatles’ Day Tripper and Archie Bell and the Drells’ Tighten Up, the latter in cartoonish Japanese accents. They also shared a dry sense of humour, which in Yellow Magic Orchestra’s case usually fixated on western prejudices and fears about east Asians. On the cover of Solid State Survivor, they dressed in red Mao suits, enjoying a drink with an effigy of the late dictator. While the US fretted about an influx of Japanese cars and technology damaging their economy, 1980’s X∞Multiplies featured a series of sketches, one featuring a sinister Japanese businessman signing a contract, another featuring an American who realises his Japanese host can’t understand English and lets rip with a torrent of racist abuse: “The Japanese are pigs, yellow monkeys, they have small cocks and short legs.” As a moral panic erupted over the deleterious and addictive effect of the Taito Corporation’s Space Invaders games, Yellow Magic Orchestra’s records literally sounded like arcade games: their eponymous debut album was packed with interludes featuring their bleeping noises and tinny Game Over death marches.

And, like Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra proved vastly influential – or rather, it took the rest of the world a little while to catch up: there was something telling about the fact that Solid State Survivor wasn’t released in the UK until 1982, at the height of the synth-pop wave that YMO had presaged. By then, their music had found its way into the collections of DJs and producers in New York’s burgeoning hip-hop scene – they were apparently astonished when the audience on Soul Train began breakdancing when they performed Computer Games – although it was a track from one of the solo albums Sakamoto had begun releasing concurrent with his career in YMO that had the biggest long-term impact. Riot in Lagos, from 1980’s B-2 Unit, had been recorded in London with reggae producer Dennis Bovell, and was apparently inspired by the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti. It remains an astonishingly timeless and effervescent piece of electronica: if you didn’t know it and were told it was released last month, rather than 42 years ago, you’d believe it. Abstract but funky, it cast a considerable shadow over dance music: it was big club hit on release, helped shape the sound of electro and turned the head of hip-hop producers including Kurtis Mantronik. Drum n’ bass producers Foul Play sampled it, and you can hear its influence in the music of 90s electronic luminaries Aphex Twin and Autechre.

Yellow Magic Orchestra split in 1983. If Sakamoto had left it at that and returned to modern classical music, he would already have earned himself a place among the era’s greatest pop innovators. But with the release of Nagisa Ōshima’s film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, in which he also starred, he began a career as a soundtrack composer that clearly suited his temperament far better than the Beatlemania-like scenes Yellow Magic Orchestra had provoked at home. It would lead him to work with Bernardo Bertolucci, Pedro Almodóvar, Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone, among others, and be showered with awards, including an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

But the vocal version of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’s haunting main theme, retitled Forbidden Colours, also cemented a partnership with former Japan vocalist David Sylvian that had begun with the 1982 single Bamboo Houses/Bamboo Music. Along with Can’s Holger Czukay and experimental trumpeter Jon Hassell, he became part of Sylvian’s repertory company for a series of extraordinary albums that attempted to reimagine 80s pop in a more expansive, exploratory and pensive way.

They seemed to reflect Sakamoto’s own position within pop after Yellow Magic Orchestra. Sakamoto’s solo albums largely contained music that existed at one remove from whatever else was happening, in a space where he could follow his own path. On 1989’s Beauty and 1991’s Heartbeat, it sometimes seemed as if he was constructing his own brand of the exotica that had entranced YMO, blending eastern, western and African influences together, assembling eclectic and improbable guest lists that, on Beauty alone, included Youssou N’Dour, Robbie Robertson, Robert Wyatt, Brian Wilson and Prince protege Jill Jones.

It wasn’t as if Ryuichi Sakamoto needed to be at the centre of pop culture in person: thanks to sampling, the centre of pop culture was never that far from his music. In recent years, it’s been borrowed by the Weeknd, Justice, Burial, the Beastie Boys, Jennifer Lopez, Brandy and Freddie Gibbs.

In the late 70s, the other members of Yellow Magic Orchestra had called him the Professor, a jokey nickname that contrasted Sakamoto’s intellectual bearing with his unwanted role as the group’s main heart-throb. It was a title Sakamoto seemed to grow into more and more in his later years: recording minimalist albums with German artist Alva Noto, providing ambient scores for art installations, releasing live orchestral and solo piano recordings of his compositions. There are clips of Yellow Magic Orchestra in the 2017 documentary Coda, which showed Sakamoto returning to work following a diagnosis of throat cancer, but it’s still hard to square the young pop star who stares imperiously down from his apartment wall in a portrait by Andy Warhol with the man in his late 60s, learnedly discussing classical organ chorales, the purity of the sounds he recorded during a trip to the North Pole and whether a piano going out of tune represented “matter struggling to return to a natural state”.

The album Coda depicted him working on, async, was released in 2017. It combined Bach-inspired piano pieces with monumental drones, distorted synthesisers and ambient field recordings. The artists who lined up to remix its tracks came from the leftfield cutting-edge of electronic music: if you wanted evidence of how widespread Ryuichi Sakamoto’s influence was, the fact that his work was clearly an inspiration for the likes of Arca and Oneohtrix Point Never and had been sampled by Jennifer Lopez on a US No 1 single seems a reasonable place to start. Contemplating his mortality in 2017, Sakamoto said he wanted to make “music I won’t be ashamed to leave behind – meaningful work”. By any metric, he already had.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Ryuichi Sakamoto #in memoriam

[mybeingthere]

Anne Madden is particularly well known in both Ireland and France where she has divided her time for the past forty years. Of Irish and Anglo-Chilean origin, Anne Madden spent her first years in Chile. Her parents returned to Europe to live in Ireland and in London, where she subsequently attended the Chelsea School of Arts and Crafts. During this period she was impressed by an important exhibition of American painting at the Royal Academy. It was Abstract Expressionism that opened up new possibilities of experimentation for her at that time. She later met some of these artists in Paris and New York among them Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and others with some of whom she exchanged works. The techniques employed included palette knife and paint flows and soon involved the use of multiple canvases as a means of creating pictorial interactions.

She began to exhibit in group shows in London and Dublin from the age of 18. The Burren and her love of wilderness informed these early paintings. Her work was then interrupted for three years by a series of operations on her spine. During that time she met the painter Louis le Brocquy who was then working in London. They married in 1958 and set up house and studio in the south of France, where two sons were born to them, Alexis and Pierre.

From the mid sixties on their comparatively reclusive life in Carros village was changed by the opening of the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul, where over the years they were constantly meeting painters, sculptors, writers, poets, and musicians forming friendships resumed in Paris and elsewhere. In 1965 Anne Madden represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale, before regularly exhibiting in that city. From the 1960s she began to pour paint onto the canvas making a series of abstract landscapes influenced by her time as a young girl in the west of Ireland, near the Burren in Co Clare. Between 1970 and 1979 she embarked on a large series of vertical works, their size determined by her height and reach. Reflecting on life and death, the works derived from megaliths and other prehistoric monuments seen in the Burren were elegiac in nature. In the 1980s Madden stopped painting for a time and devoted herself to drawing. This resulted in a series of large works in graphite and oil paint on paper entitled Openings, which formed the exhibition of her work at the Fondation Maeght, in 1983 and represented her in ROSC '84.

[pagansphinx]

George Henry Boughton (Anglo-American, 1833 – 1905) • The Lady of the Snows • c. 1896 • Walker Gallery, National Museums of Liverpool

#art #painting #fine art #art history #george henry boughton #anglo-american artist #winter landscape #winter scene #pagan sphinx art blog #women in paintings #portrait #female portrait #artwork #oil painting #victorian art #victorian winter fashion

[ceofjohnlennon]

Dave Sholin: "In 1975, John Lennon and Yoko were blessed with the child they'd wanted so badly — their son, Sean Ono Lennon."

John Lennon: "He was born on October the ninth, which I was, so we're almost like twins. The funny thing is, if he doesn't see me a few days or if I'm really, really busy and just sort of get a glimpse of him, or if I'm feeling depressed without him even seeing me, he sort of picks up on it, and he starts getting that way. So it's like I can no longer afford to have artistic depressions, which usually produced a miserable song, but it was something I could use. So if I start going really deep, sort of wallowing in a depression so I kind of enjoy it as best I can, he'll start coming down with stuff, so I'm sort of obligated to keep up. But sometimes I can't because something'll make me depressed, and there's no way I can deal with it. And then sure as hell, he'll get a cold or trap his finger in the door or something will happen. So now I have more reason to stay healthy and bright. I can no longer wallow in it and say, "Well, this is how artists are supposed to be, I suppose. Write the blues, you know..."

Dave Sholin: "John told us he didn't want to repeat his macho mistakes of the past. He wanted to be a true father to Sean, an around-the-clock daddy."

John Lennon: "A boy was really programmed to go in the army. That was about it, you know. And you had to be tough, and you're not supposed to cry, and you're not supposed to show emotion. And I know Americans show more emotion and are more open than English people. But it's pretty similar over here. There's that Calvinist, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon ethic, which is don't touch, don't react, don't feel. And I think that's what screwed us all up, and I think it's time for a change."

Dave Sholin: "Lennon obviously realized that he could never be called a typical father; his fame and wealth made that label absurd. But the love in John Lennon's heart for Sean, and the desire that love created to spend as much time as possible with his boy, led to some deep thinking on raising a child."

John Lennon: "I took the time... Any famous star... and I'm not going to name any names, but many of them have had problems with their kids, either killing themselves or in various ways. I don't buy that bit about quality over quantity. You know, like an hour a week of intense rolling in the hay together is better than twenty minutes every day of you being bitchy and just being yourself around him. So I don't try and be the God Almighty kind of figure that never... Is always smiling and just this wonderful father. Nobody knows about children, that's the thing... You look in the books — there's no real experts. Everybody's got a different opinion. You learn by default in a way. I made a lot of mistakes already, but what can you do? I think it's better for him to see me as I am. If I'm grumpy, I'm grumpy. If I'm not, I'm not. If I want to play, I play. If I don't, I don't. I don't. kowtow to him. I’m straight with him as I can be. Yes, I can afford to take the time, but anybody with a working wife might be able to afford to take the time if they've not got a working wife because they're poor and they both have to work. But I know lots of dads who aren't working that hard, who are just sitting in an office all day anyway to avoid life. They're sitting behind desks, and they're doing nothing, just shoveling paper, right, waiting for lunchtime to get a cocktail. But I don't buy that "My career is so important that I'll deal with the kids later" bit, which I already did with my first marriage and my first child. I kind of regret it. My other son by my first marriage is seventeen. I don't remember seeing him as a child. It didn't even enter... Like most guys of twenty-four, twenty-five, they're too intent on their career, really."

John Lennon for Dave Sholin in December, 1980 (Published on December, 14, 1980). ㅡ From the book "Lennon On Lennon: Conversations With John Lennon" by Jeff Burger.

#john lennon #80s #1980 #dave sholin #sean ono lennon #julian lennon #lennon on lennon #my:read #this is important!! #he was trying to be better #he knew his mistakes

[therobertfrasergang]

Robert Fraser in the Evening Standard, June 8 1967

Modern art: The currency between the financier and his son

This article appeared in the Evening Standard on June 8, 1967. It was part of a series on fathers and sons. Part 4 profiled the Fraser family, focusing on Lionel Fraser and Robert Fraser.

The entire article is transcribed below the cut.

A Name to Live Up To, by Tom Pocock

Modern art: The currency between the financier and his son

The rebel son being so essential a stock figure in family lore it would seem that Robert Fraser has all the qualifications of a particularly fine specimen. Seldom can the worlds of father and son have been in such stunning contrast and seldom can father and son have seemed, to outsiders, such opposites.

Robert Fraser is the son of the later Lionel Fraser.

At 29, Robert Fraser is founder and proprietor of the Robert Fraser Gallery in Mayfair, the most avant garde, far-out art gallery in London.

Currently, he is awaiting an exhibition by Mr. Andy Warhol, the American experimental artist, which, it can safely be forecast, will be unlike anything yet seen in an art gallery, or, possibly, anywhere else.

Mr. Fraser has suffered a lot of publicity recently having been fined £20 under the Vagrancy Act of 1838 for exhibiting “obscene” drawings and collages by the American artist Jim Dine, whose work is represented at the Tate.

Mr. Fraser was duly credited in Time magazine’s memorable discovery of swinging London. Mr. Fraser’s scene is one to make British squares close their ranks. His father, who died two years ago, was a man for whom the inescapable adjective was “distinguished.” Tycoon was too vulgar a word for Lionel Fraser. A financier, who made money-making seem like high diplomacy, he ranked high among the City’s royalty.

A self-made man (his father was butler to Gordon Selfridge, the department store emperor) Lionel Fraser carried himself as if born to wealth and position.

His influence in banking, investment trusts, insurance and industry came primarily through Helbert Wagg, the merchant bankers, Thomas Tilling, the industrial holding company and Babcock and Wilcox, the engineers, but his photograph—a dignified face, white hair and an immaculate bow tie—often appeared on City pages in connection with anything from publishing to cars, take-overs to mergers.

Tragedy

The Fraser family was, and is, conventional in a prosperous and intelligent way. Living In Belgravia and, like a surprising number of their like, Christian Scientists, the Frasers lived a contented life until touched by tragedy.

Ten years ago the only daughter, Janet, a beautiful, vivid girl, who, at the age of 21, had been secretary to Sir William Haley, then editor of The Times, was killed with her fiancé in a road accident. Then at 69, Lionel Fraser died.

Robert Fraser's mother and his brother, a stockbroker, continue to lead the lives to which they were accustomed. But not Robert Fraser.

Robert Fraser's quick, delicate person is so different from his father’s stately presence; his accent, Anglo-American; his conversation, stream-of-consciousness.

“Did I rebel? I never thought of that. I just do what I like doing. That's what everyone tries to do. I try to avoid doing things that I don’t like. Did my father influence me? I don't think that parents do have influences—the best parents don’t have influences. I might be influenced by ideas but not by parents. I never thought heredity plays a great part except that you react against it. It’s environment that matters.”

Robert Fraser was first sent to a Christian Science school but “could not get attuned to it. I feel religious but not interested in religion.”

Then to Eton, “which is better than anywhere else because it is eccentric. But English boarding schools are insane. Education is teaching but you are not taught. In 15 years learning Latin I never heard anyone stop and say: ‘This is a beautiful poem.’ I'm glad I was educated, but it would have been nice to have been taught."

But, by what Robert Fraser would put down as environment, his father did influence him. Lionel Fraser was a patron of modern art and, as a trustee of the Tate Gallery did, in his son’s view “much to improve that stale atmosphere. Many American cities have better collections and Americans who hear about the Tate go there and ask: ‘What’s it all about?’

The dust

“My father wanted the Tate to shake off the dust and tried to align it with the present. But this is not so much an indictment of the Tate as of England. In England it takes time to change things.”

After Eton, Robert Fraser went to New York and joined the art scene. Five years ago, he returned to London and, with his father's encouragement, opened the gallery in Duke Street. Then, says Robert Fraser: “London was very boring. Suddenly, around 1964, it was all happening. An eruption, you know. A social revolution.

“What the Beatles call The Beautiful People. These people—these young artists, writers and musicians—these people are the privileged class now. They used to have no voice. Now they are blowing off the dust.

“All this youth paraphernalia came from here. These people are original. These ideas are mainly coming from England. New York is sterile, uncreative, l mean, you go to the States— they have a fantastic industry for everything: machine-guns, cosmetics, Lichtenstein paintings. It’s an industrial thing. The English give them the idea and they make a thing of it.”

Robert Fraser thinks that his father would have understood and enjoyed 1967 scene. “He was a Victorian but the best of the Victorians were like really important business people today: they had imagination. My father's mixed with some very conventional people but he never belonged to them. He would never do things because they had been done before. The Victorians were like that before the calcification began. My father was one of the few people in this country who liked new things. Most people distrust new things.”

Balance

The obvious differences between father and son seemed less important. And as Robert Fraser talked he sounded less like an arbiter of the arts but more like an adventurous tycoon. “Art dealing the way l do it needs a fine balance of judgement. Most dealers buy something because they know they can sell it at a profit. I back my own taste. I show what I like.”

Robert Fraser refuses to have what he likes labelled “because people love to be able to pigeonhole things. I like to keep people on edge. Anything new is uncomfortable. I like people coming into the gallery to feel uneasy. A picture that makes you happy now may have made people acutely uncomfortable when it was first painted.'” Currently he is thinking of forms of art-dealing outside the gallery, something that he cannot yet define but obviously something of which Mr. Warhol would approve.

“As art widens its scope,” he says, “so must galleries.” The next move is the Warhol exhibition. After that, perhaps films. The Fraser imaginatlon roams farther and farther out.

The son of the discreet financier then reveals another of his father’s traits. “Some people who meet me say that they didn't know there was a person called Robert Fraser. But they still came to the Robert Fraser Gallery because they knew they'd find a certain kind of thing. I liked that.”

I suspect Lionel Fraser would have liked that, too. It is called reputation.

#robert fraser #robert fraser gallery #lionel fraser #evening standard #1967 #andy warhol

[boygirldykefag]

Edit: Do not send this blog asks asking for money. I will delete them without reading them. I don't give out money, zero exceptions, I don't have much and I get very very anxious whenever I spend it on anything regardless on how good the cause is. I don't even have a source of income. So don't ask this blog for money.

Some clarification! "Full flavor queer" is a term I've adapted from EDM, where a song with 4+ EDM genres is considered "full flavor". I am:

-Bisexual

-Bigender

-Transgender

-Demiromantic

-Polyamorous

-Lesbian

and I call myself a strawberry cause I'm a trans girl into EDM! It's a reference to Dubstep artist Dani Demand, "Dubstep's strawberry girl", who's probably referencing Celeste herself.

More identity stuff! I'm Honduran-American and Anglo-Latina (mixed ethnicity). I'm a writer (not published (yet)) that loves cartoons and video games! I have many many fandoms, included but not limited to: A Hat in Time, Bocchi the Rock!, Carmen Sandiego 2019, Equilinox, Jelle's Marble Runs, NoCopyrightSounds, OneShot, RiME, Star Trek, Team Fortress 2, The Owl House, Steven Universe, ATLA, and Ultimate Chicken Horse. Welcome to my Tumblr!