28.2.14

Idris Elba's How Clubbing Changed the World


Actor and international DJ Idris Elba counts down the defining moments of the greatest cultural phenomenon of our generation in a programme featuring some of the biggest names in dance music.
Twenty-five years after the birth of rave, a new generation of British DJs and producers are at the forefront of a global musical revolution.
From trance to dubstep, the sound of British producers has now become the most sought-after commodity for the biggest pop stars on the planet.
Reaching far beyond the sweaty dance floors of the Hacienda and the Ministry of Sound, this programme reveals how British nightclubbing transformed our nation and influenced societies across the world.
With personal insights and club-raising anecdotes from David Guetta, Armand van Helden, Paul Oakenfold, will.i.am, Nile Rodgers, Goldie, Pete Tong, Katy B, Skream and former Home Secretary Michael Howard, amongst many more, this entertaining and thought-provoking film celebrates the British success story that has conquered the world.
From sun-kissed holidays on the party island of Ibiza to the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, and from illegal warehouse raves to Labour's 1992 adoption of D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better, clubbing has touched everyone's life whether they know it or not.
This is an international story, going beyond the music to look at clubbing's influence on everything from real estate to drug use, fashion, politics and the drinks industry.
How Clubbing Changed the World explores how clubbing went from a counter-cultural movement that defined a generation to a multi-billion-pound business, and reveals how, 25 years on, Great Britain is still king of the underground.

24.2.14

Aural Sonata Vol. 2



"Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, 
even ecstasy. Music, in fact,is the one and the other, 
only better." (Emil Cioran)

5.2.14

Rene Ricard (July 23, 1946 – February 1, 2014)

 


Life and career

Ricard was born in Boston and grew up near New Bedford in Acushnet, Massachusetts. As a young teenager he ran away to Boston and assimilated into the literary scene of the city. By age eighteen, he had moved to New York City, where he became a protégé of Andy Warhol. He appeared in the Warhol films Kitchen (1965), Chelsea Girls (1966), and The Andy Warhol Story (1966).

As a performer, Ricard was a founding participant in the Theater of the Ridiculous collaborating with John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam. He also appeared in the 1980 Eric Mitchell independent film Underground U.S.A. (1980), as well as numerous other independent art and commercial films.

In the 1980s, he wrote a series of influential essays for Artforum magazine.[3] Having achieved stature in the art world by successfully launching the career of painter Julian Schnabel,[4] Ricard helped bring Jean-Michel Basquiat to fame.[5] In December 1981 he published the first major article on Basquiat, entitled "The Radiant Child," in Artforum.[6] Ricard also contributed art essays to numerous gallery and exhibition catalogs.

Ricard was immortalized by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the drawing entitled Untitled (Axe/Rene),[7] representing the tension that existed between the two.

Andy Warhol called Ricard "the George Sanders of the Lower East Side, the Rex Reed of the art world."[8]

From the mid-1960s Ricard contributed writings to numerous independent poetry magazines and anthologies. In 1979, the Dia Art Foundation published Ricard's first book of poems, an eponymous volume styled on Tiffany & Co. catalog. The fact that the turquoise-covered book of poems appears in photographs taken on the beach in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin illustrates its ubiquity as summer reading in 1979.

His second book of poetry, God With Revolver (Hanuman Books) was published ten years later, edited by Raymond Foye. The same year he contributed poems to Francesco Clemente: Sixteen Pastels (London: Anthony D'Offay). Ricard released two other volumes of poetry: Trusty Sarcophagus Co. (Inanout Press, 1990), which featured his poems rendered in paintings and drawings and was the basis of an exhibit at the Petersburg Gallery, New York City; and Love Poems (C U Z Editions, 1999) as a collaboration with artist Robert Hawkins who provided drawings for the book. Ricard also saw publication of single-poem works as limited edition artist books: Opera of the Worms with paintings by Judith Rifka (1984), Cecil (2004), and In Daddy's Hand with artist Rita Barros (2010).

Beginning in the late 1980s Ricard's poems were often rendered in paintings and drawings. His work was the subject of several solo gallery exhibitions in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as being represented in many group exhibitions.

In 2003, Percival Press published the full-color monograph Paintings & Drawings, illustrating a collection of visually rendered poems by Ricard. In 2004, Ricard created the album cover for Shadows Collide With People by musician John Frusciante.

Ricard was portrayed by Michael Wincott in Julian Schnabel's biographical film, Basquiat (1996). He lived at the famed Hotel Chelsea in New York City intermittently for 40 years.[9][10]



Ricard died on February 1, 2014 of cancer at Bellevue Hospital in New York City aat the age of 67.[2]