Ballin’

This video is so New Orleans I can’t stand it. Whoever directed this is visionary. This Big Tymers video is basically just a block party with some incredible tableau vivant posturing by the block residents. 

Here is an mp3 of the not-safe-for-radio version.

Big Ballin’

The album covers for the No Limit and Cash Money labels in the late ’90s are insane feats of photoshopping. Just a few for your perusal:

The Secret Garden

We’re taking it back to the dawn of the The Gentlebear’s sexual awareness.

 

Here is Al B. Sure!, El Debarge, James Ingram and Barry White singing The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite) off Quincy Jones’ 1989 album Back On the Block. I remember my friend Shaquita Borden lending me this cd in the 9th grade, along with Digital Underground’s Sex Packets.  

The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite)

 

I remember hearing the Brooklyn R&B group Whistle singing “Right Next to Me” on WEZB-97 one morning before school in the 8th grade, and I thought it was the most beautiful song I had ever heard. I had sliding mirror doors on my closet and I would sit in front of them drying my hair, and I just felt so utterly transfixed by this song that I stopped drying my hair and took in the tranquility. I think this was the first time I knew what tranquility was. I was, like, totally meditating or something.

Right Next to Me

 

New Edition sans Bobby Brown was always better.

Can You Stand the Rain?

 

I couldn’t find a good pic of the Force M.D.s, but a google image search for “Tender Love”, their amazing single from 1985, culled up this image, which is indeed a tender and loving image of white people embracing. By the way, M.D. stood for “musical diversity.”

Tender Love

 

Love In the Altitudes

There’s an obvious theme for this posting. 

The b side to this single is my favorite Dead Moon track. 

In the Altitudes

Traffic Sound was a Peruvian psychedelic band that formed in the late sixties. Here is their cover of the excellent Animals anti-war song “Sky Pilot.”

Sky Pilot

Here we have Kate Bush rhapsodizing about psychoanalyst William Reich’s “cloudbuster”, a machine designed to shoot orgone energy (“the primordial cosmic energy”) toward clouds to break them up and induce rain. The rain would consequently battle the desertification of the earth.

Cloudbusting

For some reason, I like this corny-ass 1985 song from the Rah Band (actually just the producer Richard Hewson). 

Clouds Across the Moon

This was the first Nick drake song I fell in love with. For some reason, my 24-year-old really responded to the line “Will you love me ’til I’m dead?” Everything was life or death back then. Thank God I’m over that.

Northern Sky

Eating The Sky

Perhaps it is counter-intuitive to add music to a poem by John Giorno since his delivery is so musical to begin with, but here is Giorno reading “Eating With Sky” with the musical accompaniment of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2.  I remember my brother, sister, and I buying this record for my mother for Mother’s Day in the early eighties. This was quite an improvement over the Jean Nate perfume sets she was used to receiving. 

Eating The Sky edit

Giorno is well-known as the creator of the record label Giorno Poetry Systems, as well as Dial-A-Poem, in which listeners called in to one of 15 telephone lines to hear fresh poems from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Joe Brainard, and Bernadette Mayer.  

The artist and writer Joe Brainard’s book, I Remember, is a favorite of mine. Brainard seemed unafraid of being a sentimentalist, which to me is refreshing in an environment where sarcasm and cynicism are constantly masking our true emotions. I’m not trying to make any big statements there. Brainard died of AIDS-related illness in 1994. Below is a picture of him in his studio,  and one of his biggest artistic subjects, comic heroine Nancy.

Lastly, a Dial-A-Poem excerpt from I Remember :

I Remember

 

The Conversation

Some of my favorite film music is from Coppola’s The Conversation. David Shire’s piano theme must have been the inspiration for French composer Colleen’s composition, In the Train with No Lights. A pivotal moment in the film is a scene of Gene Hackman’s lonely character Harry Caul riding the elevated train in Chicago while the theme plays, the lights intermittently cutting out leaving Caul in the darkness. 

Theme from The Conversation- David Shire

In the Train With No Lights- Colleen