Gordon Ball spent 28 years taking candid photos of Beat legend Allen Ginsberg and his colorful circle of friends. The Howl scribe’s life is well documented in over one thousand images that Ball captured from 1969 — at Ginsberg’s Cherry Valley, New York farm that the photographer managed for a time — to the author’s funerals in New York City in 1997. Paging through Ball’s photos, you’ll find Beat fellows and other friends like Burroughs (in swimming trunks!), writer Herbert Huncke, poets Philip Whalen, Peter Orlovsky (also Ginsberg’s lifelong partner), Gregory Corso, and even Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Shots of Ginsberg’s Lower East Side apartment, his desk, and other personal belongings have also been intimately captured.
The counterculture poet’s aforementioned farm — which Ginsberg described as “a haven for comrades in distress” — has inspired a new book for Ball, East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg. “First described as an uninspiring, dilapidated four-bedroom house with acres of untended land, including the graves of its first residents, East Hill Farm became home to those who sought pastoral enlightenment in the presence of Ginsberg’s brilliance and generosity.” Pick up a copy of the book over here, and visit our gallery past the break where we share Ball’s deeply personal photographs of the literary legend.
We recently stumbled over this great blast from the past over at Good Food Stories: a collection of “Eat This” columns from the now-defunct but definitely life-changingSassy Magazine, in which staffers and celebrities taught readers how to make their favorite dishes. Evan Dando of the Lemonheads shares the ingredients of his special “Morning Noonan Night Sauce,” while a wildly young-looking Sonic Youth suggests putting butter on your tuna tacos, and Spike Jonze and Beastie Boy drummer Mike D. spend five hours making a carrot cake. There are suggestions from non-celebrities too, all worth a look for that trademark Sassy attitude so rare in print publications these days. Click through for a little culinary inspiration from the early ’90s, and head on over to Good Food Stories for bigger images and even more recipes!
The Sailor Jerry Presents concert series sails on, and the most recent addition to its roster has been most excellent Detroit garage stalwarts the Dirtbombs. We nominated the band’s latest album, Party Store, as one of the most underrated of 2011 during a mid-year wrap-up, and our opinion hasn’t changed — if you haven’t heard it, it’s a collection of covers of old Detroit techno tracks reinvented as garage-rock tunes. It’s also a fantastic and original piece of work, and still gets a regular workout on the Flavorpill stereo. Plus, it catalyzed various discussions about other great covers records from over the years, inspiring us to round up ten of our all-time favorites, starting with Party Store itself.
The Weeknd’s new mixtape Echoes of Silence is out this week, completing the trilogy of releases that started in March with the much-hyped House of Balloons and continued in August with Thursday. You can read our very own Russ Marshalek writing about Echoes of Silence for MTV here, but in the meantime, The Weeknd’s prolific 2011 has got us thinking about other album trilogies that have floated our collective boats over the years. Unlike, say, the world of fantasy, where you’re no one until you’ve turned out a couple of trilogies, coherent three-album sequences aren’t all that common in music, but there have still been some crackers over the years — check out a quick selection of our favorites after the jump, and let us know what yours are.
1. Two films that focus on father and son relationships — Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Mike Mills’ Beginners — shared the award for Best Feature at last night’s Gotham Independent Film Awards. View the full list of winners here.
2. Tom Hanks is set to produce (and possibly play the lead in) a new film based on Erik Larson’s nonfiction bestseller In the Garden of Beasts. The book tells the story of US ambassador William Dodd’s experiences in Berlin at the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power. [via Vulture]
3. Alan Cumming will star in a one-man version of Macbeth that makes its US debut at the 2012 Lincoln Center Festival this summer; the project began with the idea “to swap the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, because there are so many things about gender, I thought it would be a really exciting idea to flip that.” [via ArtsBeat]
4. “It kind of remains to be seen at this point what happens to the future. I think they are certainly the last shows for a while and I guess I’d just leave it at that.” — Lee Ranaldotalks to Rolling Stone about what’s next for Sonic Youth
5. Sad but true: According to TMZ, hordes of Twihards have been faking engagements in order to try on the $799 replica of Bella’s wedding dress from Breaking Dawn that is being sold in Alfred Angelo bridal boutiques. [via Videogum]
We admit, we don’t usually follow the ins and outs of celebrity romance, but this, unfortunately, is a special occasion. Alternative rock’s royal couple Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore have split up after 27 years of marriage, throwing Sonic Youth’s future into uncertainty and the romantic ideals of a generation into disarray. Their famously solid marriage has inspired many an alternative-rock romance, but it seems that flannel-wearing bandmates must now court each other without the shining light at the end of the tunnel.
The news was confirmed in a statement from their rep at Matador records, which reads, ”Musicians Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, married in 1984, are announcing they have separated. Sonic Youth, with both Kim and Thurston involved, will proceed with its South American tour dates in November. Plans beyond that tour are uncertain. The couple has requested respect for their personal privacy and does not wish to issue further comment.”
First R.E.M. and now this? Our teenage years are begging for mercy.
When the news broke that Neil Young is writing an all-encompassing memoir, it got us thinking about what other musicians — and specifically which of our favorite current indie rockers — we’d like to see compose tell-all autobiographies. Mysterious band break-ups, high-profile couplings gone awry, reclusive behavior, extensive touring, and cult childhoods exposed would all make for awesome, page-turning reads for those of us who have always been curious about the private goings-on behind the music. So, in hopes of giving our favorite potential memoirists a gentle push, we’ve complied a list of ten artists whose lives who we’d love to learn more about.
Rolling Stone readers polls are the worst. Remember their “Top Ten Live Acts of All Time,” which was so terrible the entire Flavorpill staff came together to post an alternate list? Well, the aging rock magazine has done it again: Last week brought “Readers Poll: The Best Punk Bands of All Time.” And guess what? Not only did Green Day — Green Day! — take the #1 spot, but there wasn’t a single woman on the list. So, in an attempt to correct this latest grievous error, we have compiled a list of 15 essential women punk icons. Let’s be clear: These are hardly the only noteworthy women in punk. They’re simply the ones we think have absolutely earned a spot in any discussion of the best punk bands of all time.
As we reported, Nickelodeon plans to re-air some of their most beloved ’90s series in a block dubbed The ’90s Are All That. While some at Flavorwire worried that this resurrection of Kenan, Kel, Clarissa, and the like will rob these shows of the nostalgia that endear them to us (and make for such impassioned party conversations), others rejoiced. We poured ourselves celebratory orange sodas; we hung up our Fergface dart boards; we even went so far as to start our nostalgic navel-gazing a bit early and re-watch The Adventures of Pete & Pete. We discovered that a lot of our favorite musicians stopped by Wellsville during Pete & Pete‘s three seasons — from Iggy Pop to Michael Stipe, a surprising number of artists have made bizarre and wonderful cameos. After the jump, check out ten of our favorite guest appearances.
Here’s something that probably won’t surprise you about Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon’s 16-year-old daughter, Coco Gordon Moore: She’s a tall, gorgeous blonde who knows how to front a freaking rock ‘n’ roll band. We had the pleasure of seeing her perform back in the fall, as part of a combo called She Murders at a tribute concert for Kathleen Hanna; Coco sang a reverent and energetic version of Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.”
Now, Pitchfork points us to Coco’s other band, Big Nils, whose debut album, Sibling, is streaming on their Bandcamp site. For $5, you can download it. The eight-song recording is pure, skronky, adolescent punk, featuring one song about STDs (“You got the herpes/ What you gonna do about it?”) and an eyebrow-raising number about a mother-daughter relationship (“Deep Dark Death”). Speaking of moms, what’s sure to make the biggest impression on Sonic Youth fans is just how much frontwoman Coco sounds like Kim — although she evidently prefers a tortured scream to Gordon’s signature ice-cold whisper.
