Podcast appearances and mentions of Paul Morrissey

Jeff Copeland is the author of the new book Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn: A Walk On The Wild Side With Andy Warhol's Most Fabulous Superstar. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, and the inspiration to the opening verse of the 1973 Lou Reed song “Walk On The Wildside”, was washed up. But a chance meeting with Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of ‘making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. This is the story of how an unlikely friendship between a young gay writer and a “mature” trans-gender actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. Purchase a copy of Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn: A Walk On The Wild Side With Andy Warhol's Most Fabulous SuperstarJoin the Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn Facebook pageVisit the Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn YouTube channel Visit Jeff Copeland's Facebook page---------- BookedOnRock.com The Booked On Rock Store The Booked On Rock YouTube Channel Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOKINSTAGRAMTIKTOKX Find Your Nearest Independent Bookstore Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.com The Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” by Crowander / “Last Train North” & “No Mercy” by TrackTribe

In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about one of the most infamous of Warhol's Superstars. A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break...and the legendary Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay.  A chance meeting with starry-eyed corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of 'making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. This book about writing a book is a celebration of chutzpa and love as Holly, the embodiment of Auntie Mame, introduces Jeff to the glamorous (and sometimes larcenous) world of a Warhol Superstar. In turn, Jeff uses his writing (and typing) talent to give Holly the second chance at fame she craved. In turns hilarious and heartwarming, Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a portrait of the real Holly who loved deeply, laughed loudly, and left mayhem in her wake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about one of the most infamous of Warhol's Superstars. A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break...and the legendary Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay.  A chance meeting with starry-eyed corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of 'making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. This book about writing a book is a celebration of chutzpa and love as Holly, the embodiment of Auntie Mame, introduces Jeff to the glamorous (and sometimes larcenous) world of a Warhol Superstar. In turn, Jeff uses his writing (and typing) talent to give Holly the second chance at fame she craved. In turns hilarious and heartwarming, Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a portrait of the real Holly who loved deeply, laughed loudly, and left mayhem in her wake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about one of the most infamous of Warhol's Superstars. A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break...and the legendary Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay.  A chance meeting with starry-eyed corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of 'making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. This book about writing a book is a celebration of chutzpa and love as Holly, the embodiment of Auntie Mame, introduces Jeff to the glamorous (and sometimes larcenous) world of a Warhol Superstar. In turn, Jeff uses his writing (and typing) talent to give Holly the second chance at fame she craved. In turns hilarious and heartwarming, Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a portrait of the real Holly who loved deeply, laughed loudly, and left mayhem in her wake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about one of the most infamous of Warhol's Superstars. A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break...and the legendary Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay.  A chance meeting with starry-eyed corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of 'making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. This book about writing a book is a celebration of chutzpa and love as Holly, the embodiment of Auntie Mame, introduces Jeff to the glamorous (and sometimes larcenous) world of a Warhol Superstar. In turn, Jeff uses his writing (and typing) talent to give Holly the second chance at fame she craved. In turns hilarious and heartwarming, Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a portrait of the real Holly who loved deeply, laughed loudly, and left mayhem in her wake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about one of the most infamous of Warhol's Superstars. A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break...and the legendary Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay.  A chance meeting with starry-eyed corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of 'making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. This book about writing a book is a celebration of chutzpa and love as Holly, the embodiment of Auntie Mame, introduces Jeff to the glamorous (and sometimes larcenous) world of a Warhol Superstar. In turn, Jeff uses his writing (and typing) talent to give Holly the second chance at fame she craved. In turns hilarious and heartwarming, Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a portrait of the real Holly who loved deeply, laughed loudly, and left mayhem in her wake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Dan and Bradley deal with our guest Will Mendoza for over two hours talking about a movie that virtually no one has seen. The Movie is MADAME WANG's a 1981 film directed by PAUL MORRISSEY, its a great film (one of Bradley's favorite first watches for 24') and Will is a great guest - so you should listen to this.... now damnit! you can follow mr. Medoza here link and follow his fantastic podcast MEN ON FILM on Apple Podcasts here link

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Comedian Paul Morrissey (https://paulhasawebsite.com) joins Randy and Daniel Van Kirk (sitting in for Jason) to discuss Michigan beating Ohio State again, The NBA Cup tournament, the Bears, pro skateboarder Kader Sylla gets arrested for driving the wrong way in Manhattan, a man and a dog were caught riding a steer in Texas ahead of the Longhorn Showdown, the Golden Bat idea in the MLB should remain an idea and not real, and Jason Statham (Jonathan Kite) leaves another CBS NCAA basketball promo as a voicemail, and so much more!

Today the ghouls discuss the 2012 remake of the sleaze classic, Maniac. From wiki: “Maniac is a 2012 psychological slasher film directed by Franck Khalfoun, written by Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur,[4][5] and starring Elijah Wood and Nora Arnezeder. It is a remake of the 1980 film of the same name, and follows the violent exploits of a brutal serial killer.”Also discussed: mannequin hands, Lebron, Paul Morrissey, Mary Woronov, Good Luck Miss Wyckoff, Polly Platt, The Bad Seed, All That Heaven Allows, Skrillex, and more!NEXT WEEK: The Night of the Hunter (1955)Follow them across the internet: Bloodhaus:https://www.bloodhauspod.com/https://www.instagram.com/bloodhauspod/ Drusilla Adeline:https://www.sisterhydedesign.com/https://letterboxd.com/sisterhyde/ Joshua Conkelhttps://www.joshuaconkel.com/https://www.instagram.com/joshua_conkel/https://letterboxd.com/JoshuaConkel/ 

Pack your bags because we're heading to Italy to look for the blood of wirgins in (Andy Warhol's) Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula (1974), a companion piece to his (their?) Flesh for Frankenstein (1974). Tagging in for the conversation is Conrad Chambers, the co-host of Movie Oubliette and The Queer Gaze. CW: sexual assault. Join us as we try to figure out just what is going on in this wacky little movie. From Udo Kier's diva of a Dracula to the film's very, very questionable messaging when it comes to sexual assault, there's no shortage of things to discuss. Need a refresher on Flesh for Frankenstein? Listen to our episode on it right here! Questions? Comments? Snark? Connect with the boys on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Letterboxd, Facebook, or join the Facebook Group to get in touch with other listeners > Trace: @tracedthurman > Joe: @bstolemyremote > Conrad: @ConradMChambers / Movie Oubliette: @MovieOubliette / The Queer Gaze: @TheQueerGaze Be sure to support the boys on Patreon!  Theme Music: Alexander Nakarada  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've got just the prescription for everyone out there with Olympic fever: A re-release of a 2013 episode in which Matt and Andy interview David Epstein, a Sports Illustrated journalist and the author of the outstanding book The Sports Gene, along with college basketball player-turned-comedian Paul Morrissey, to discuss the field of sports genetics research and try to get to the bottom of how elite athletes are made. Enjoy!

1974 was a landmark year for film, a convergence of exciting international cinema and the original voices of New Hollywood that still resonates 50 years later. In our new series we invite a different guest for each episode to choose a 1974 movie to talk about, ranging from giant blockbusters to minor cult curios and everything else in between. For William Mendoza of the Men on Film Podcast, 1974 is marked by the rise of Paul Morrissey from Warhol Factory's house filmmaker to international sexploitation auteur. Filmed in unison with his FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN, Morrissey's broad Stoker adaptation BLOOD FOR DRACULA casts Udo Kier as the sulky, shirtless count lurking around an Italian estate, hoping to seduce "wirgins" and consume their pure fluid in order to revitalize his strength. He's impeded by Joe Dallsandro playing a Marxist handyman and famed Italian Neorealist filmmaker Vittorio de Sica who's doing...something. Mendoza loves this movie even though he admits it's a "failure of Italian exploitation," "too artsy to be a horror movie, too stupid to be an art movie." Fascinatingly the whole thing plays out like a classic dirty joke or an 80's sex comedy. There's still plenty to love, and we have a great time breaking down the Morrissey magic which stems from good filmmaking collaborators and a plentiful cast of weirdos to exploit. It's a goofball discussion, with more than a little off-roading. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com William Mendoza on X: twitter.com/MovieKessler Men on Film podcast on X: twitter.com/menonfilmpod The Pink Smoke on X: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on X: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Will is joined by Dan and Bradley from Movies From Hell to discuss Paul Morrissey's MIXED BLOOD (1984). It's the wonderfully nihilistic story of a drug war in New York's Alphabet City. IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089607/ Youtube Movie Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_ClHU5RLkg Movies from Hell X Account: https://x.com/MFHPOD Bradley's X Account: https://x.com/bradleyjkornish Dan's X Account: https://x.com/danpullenbooks

Comedian Paul Morrissey recalls his trips performing in Europe, Asia and the Middle East

This week Richard Sarvate and Kevin Casey White join Dave Holmes for very long titles to the Planet of the Apes franchise, bird call competitions, and LGBTQIA+ trivia in comics. Richard Sarvate would like to plug his album They're Gonna Know and recommends Drug Church and Paul Morrissey's Ice Cream vs EverythingKevin Casey White would like to plug his album Harangue and recommends IdlesAnd Finally, Dave Holmes is on Twitter @DaveHolmes.Dave would like to recommend Fiddlehead Fern CafeFind us on Twitter! We are @TroubledPodWritten by Riley Silverman and John-Luke Roberts, recorded remotely over Zoom and produced by Christian Dueñas and Laura Swisher.Join the MaxFun fam:maximumfun.org/join

Jim knew very little about Mark Twain, thankfully our expert Paul Morrissey (@paulhasawebsite) did! Check out Paul's website: www.paulhasawebsite.com ADS: BETTERHELP: Visit BetterHelp.com/IDK today to get 10% off your first month.

The director of 1984's "Mixed Blood" is Paul Morrissey. He is best known for having made crazy, camp and kitsch films. This particular film tells the story of a Brazilian gang of drug dealers in Manhattan led by an alpha-female mother-type. It's really vibey and strange. John Leguizamo plays a young guy playing basketball. He's on screen for about 3 seconds. This the the first feature film to feature out matrixes Johnny Legz. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kyle Kinane On Leaving LA for the Oregon Woods and His Recent Return.   Today's guest is Kyle Kinane, who has a brand new special coming out soon called "Dirt Nap." But first, Tom recounts to Kira his recent travel experiences with Joey and Paul Morrissey, including the challenges of navigating bad weather and flight changes. Tom and Kira interview Kyle Kinane about his life, career, and his latest special, "Dirt Nap." Kinane shares insights into his creative process, personal anecdotes, and his unique perspective on standup. He also talks about his dietary choices and lifestyle, providing a glimpse into his daily routine and philosophies. The conversation further delves into Kinane's approach to dealing with life's irritations and challenges, highlighting his ability to find humor in everyday situations, but struggles most when it comes to home renovations and road rage. About Tom: Tom Papa, a celebrated stand-up comedian with over 20 years in the industry, has made significant strides in film, television, radio, podcasts, and live performances. Notably, he's a regular on "The Joe Rogan Experience" and various late-night TV shows. Papa's literary skills are evident in his books “We're All In This Together” and "You're Doing Great!: And Other Reasons To Stay Alive," a collection of essays, and "Your Dad Stole My Rake: And Other Family Dilemmas," a comedic look at family life. His latest stand-up specials are “Tom Papa: What A Day!” and "Tom Papa: You're Doing Great!" on Netflix. Beyond comedy, Papa's engagements extend to hosting "What A Joke With Papa And Fortune" on SiriusXM and appearing on NPR's "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me." His love for baking led to hosting the Food Network series "Baked." As an actor, he's worked with notable figures like Rob Zombie and Steven Soderbergh and has appeared in several films and TV shows, including the HBO film "Behind the Candelabra." Additionally, Papa has contributed as a writer to projects like "Bee Movie" and various TV series. Residing in Los Angeles with his family, Papa continues to balance his professional life with personal interests like baking.

You either emailed, DM'd, or text us about these moments/guests. We laughed at these parts, too. HUGE thank you to our guests, specifically those featured on this episode - Matt Braunger, Chase O'Donnell, Ben Roy, Steve Mayne, Dr. Andrea Jones-Roy, Pepper Berry, Heather Brooker, Josh Florhaug, Dave Stone, Kaytlin Bailey, Paul Morrissey, and Rachel McDowell. We are SO lucky to have had conversations with all of our wonderful guests this past year. Join us on socials here and here! We love hearing from you! ~Happy Holidays and we'll see you in 2024~!!

March 12-18, 1983 This week Ken welcomes comedian and man behind the new Blonde Medicine Comedy lp "Ice Cream vs. Everything", Paul Morrissey. Ken and Paul discuss Paul's excitement being on the show, why he picked 1983, the early 80s mix of famous people guest stars, The Love Boat, Smokey and the Bandit, Paul Williams, Milton Berle, cocaine, 70s Variety Shows, Solid Gold, Tim Thomerson, Top of the Pops, Steelers Wheel, miming, Richard Marx's Lionel Richie debut, cigarettes, David Bowie playing with Mott the Hoople, Robin Williams, Gen Xers vs. Boomers, buying awful products from TV Guide, horrifying children's decor, having to pay massive fines for ruining a VHS tape, Diff'rent Strokes, video games, Silver Spoons, Jason Bateman, Teen Wolf, how massive Bob Hope was, Jackie Gleason, never flying, Voyagers, the death of Jon Eric Hexum, on set accidents, getting bumped on Letterman so many times it becomes an inside joke, dry cleaning The Jeffersons, Newhart, Fritz Leiber, Jay Thomas, Square Pegs, production values, Little House of the Prairie, The A-Team, Happy Days, James Bond, Remington Steel, Pierce Brosnan, The Celtics vs. The Sixers, the Celtics 80s team, Facts of Life, baby death, Very Special Episodes, Fred Willard, Magnum PI, Vietnam, CHPs, Franken and Davis, Saturday Night Live, when everything was on Ice, Benson, Knight Rider, K.I.T.T. vs. K.A.R.R., Stephen Tobolowsky, Morgan Fairchild, $20k TVs, the power of the mustache, roasts, Beverly Hills Cops, action comedies, and why Real Genius is the greatest comedy of all time. 

Comedian Paul Morrissey joins Jason and Randy to discuss Michael Jordan's son marrying Scottie Pippen's ex-wife, the new NBA in-season tournament, the 3-point line is off in Denver, Paul Pierce hitting Rubi Rose on Twitter, hiring "girlfriends for the day," and Christoph Waltz (Brad Morris) leaves a voicemail explaining the NBA tournament format, and so much more! Thanks to our sponsor: Gametime! Download the Gametime app, create an account, and use code CHEAPSEATS for $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply.

Comedian Paul Morissey joins the show today to discuss the importance of laughter, comedy, and the ways we connect through humor. He also shares his own philosophy of living and working as an artist.  Among Paul's professional appearances are his work on Dry Bar Comedy, The Late Show with David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, and headlining the 4th of July Armed Forces Entertainment Tour for US Troops in Iraq.  This episode is cohosted by London Smith, Actor, Podcaster, Comedian, MD, and creator of the Jock Doc Podcast. 

Today we're joined by Paul Morrissey, the Tom-proclaimed "Greatest Comedian Basketball Player" and Jeff Oskay with What You Failed to Mention News! Plus we talk new slang in the dictionary, football players that become actors, and the president's dog was removed from the White House! Enjoy every segment of today's BOB & TOM Show. Join Tom Griswold, Chick McGee, Kristi Lee, Josh Arnold, Pat Godwin, and Willie Griswold for a blend of comedy, talk, news, and sports. Avoid the commercials and get the full show without ads through B&T VIP. Subscribe now at BobandTom.com/VIP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

J de Los Planetas debuta en solitario con 'Plena Pausa', un disco que musica pequeñas películas inéditas de Iván Zulueta. El artista nos visita para darnos los detalles de hasta qué punto le influyó Zulueta y cómo ha buscado puntos en común con él, lo cual implica bucear en los orígenes del Pop Art, la factoría de Andy Warhol, y nombres como Jonas Mekas o Paul Morrissey. A medida que avanza el podcast, hablamos de la carrera de Los Planetas, así como de nombres como Family, el Donosti Sound o lo andaluz.

Back for part 2 this week is Comic and Commercial Actor Paul Morrissey. A lovely dude whose special, "Ice Cream vs Everything" (available now) is hilarious and worth the watch. You can find all things Paul here!  Find us on Patreon and Instagram! 

Comedian Paul Morrissey Talks About His NEW Album "Ice Cream Vs. Everything" Comedy Upbringings and More!  Connect with us on our website for more amazing conversations!  You can check out Paul and his new album here! https://www.paulhasawebsite.com/ www.brettallanshow.com  Got some feedback? Let us know! openmicguest@gmail.com  Follow us on social media! IG https://www.instagram.com/brettallanshow/ FB https://www.facebook.com/thebrettallanshow/ Twitter https://twitter.com/brettallanshow Consider giving us a kind rating and review on Apple Podcasts! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1486122533?mt=2&ls=1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comic and commercial actor (as well as retired news anchor) Paul Morrissey is with us this week to really dive in. In fact, he dove in so hard, we have another 2-parter on our hands.  Find us on Patreon and on the socials. 

This Morning, it's Spinoff Week and we travel back in time to the Dukes of Hazzard. We see what's happening in the 3 states that have the most crime Ohio, Texas, and Florida in OTF, and comedians George Schlatter and Paul Morrissey join us before their show at the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival happening now!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Comedian Paul Morrissey returns and he still has never eaten an egg.    Thank you to our sponsor AG1! Take ownership of your health at https://www.drinkag1.com/papa for a free one year supply of vitamin D and five AG1 travel packs. 

Acclaimed martial arts director King Hu's tale of court intrigue, assassination, loyalty and betrayal is long-lauded as the seminal wuxia film.  As the English-speaking internet is oddly silent about this film other than by offering just such unsubstantiated platitudes, we decide to evaluate it on (gasp!) its internal merits alone.  Our unasked-for conclusion: it's pretty damn good. Join the Random Acts of Cinema Discord server here! *Come support the podcast and get yourself or someone you love a random gift at our merch store.  T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and more! If you'd like. To watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula (1974).

We all love the monster that Frankenstein created but most of us can agree we do not love this film. We apologized for even reviewing this one but we quickly poke fun of what happens in this film. Starring Joe Dallesandro, Udo Kier, Dalila Di Lazzaro, and Monique Van Vooren. Written and Directed by Paul Morrissey in 1973. If you would like to become a supporter of the show you can check out our Patreon page and choose a tier. There are different perks at all levels and every contributor will have access to our Pre-Horror Show. Check out our favorite coffee by clicking on our link: Four Sigmatic Please share the podcast with your friends on social media to help us grow. Leave us a great review on whatever platform you are using. Check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Slasher. If you would like to watch our interviews, you can check out our YouTube channel. If you would like to ask us a question or make a suggestion for the show, send us an email at horrorscriptpodcast@gmail.com You can write us or record a voice memo of yourself asking the question and we can play it on an upcoming episodeSupport the show by picking up some Horror Script Podcast merchandiseIf you do reviews and interviews virtually try Squadcast for free by using our link. You also help support the show by using it. Special thanks to John Saccardo and Vince Lipscomb for the amazing music. Support the show

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

This Morning, could you land a plane if the pilot passed out? We find you love this weekend with Missed Connections, Jickster joins us to talk about the Springsteen concert last night, and Paul Morrissey joins us! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

News Weekly Editor, Peter Kelleher, in conversation with president of Campion College, Dr. Paul Morrissey, on the topic of classical education.

Why did John make us watch this movie? Why, John, why? Listen and find out why and how this film found a special place in John Riley's heart. Also, if you are playing the drinking game at home. Drink a shot every time John says the word "Communists!"

This week Anthony is joined by writer Heather Drain holding down co-host duties as we welcome writer, researcher, and zine publisher Rachel McPadden to discuss Paul Morrissey's Trash. Follow Rachel on Twitter Visit MondoHeather.com Follow Heather on Twitter Follow the Cult Movies Podcast on Twitter and Instagram Follow Anthony on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd Support us on Patreon

Week 4 of the Summer of Camp finds us fucking life in the gallbladder with Flesh For Frankenstein (1974). Along for the ride is returning guest Reyna Cervantes, who loves Paul Morrissey's X-Rated satire, which could never be made today!After Trace provides a quick crash course on Andy Warhol and The Factory, we dive into the 3D, the Mafia (!) and the incest/necrophilia of it all (C/W by the way). Plus: hot Udo Kier, the destruction of the nuclear family, asexuality vs gay vibes, debates about male full frontal nudity, and James Cameron? Questions? Comments? Snark? Connect with the boys on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Letterboxd, Facebook, or join the Facebook Group to get in touch with other listeners> Trace: @tracedthurman> Joe: @bstolemyremote> Reyna: @Jfcdoomblade / @WindsorFilmClubBe sure to support the boys on Patreon! Theme Music: Alexander Nakarada See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Those who have heard the conversion story of Matthew-Hermann Tague will know he often talks about virtue being the antidote to vice. In this Parousia Podcast, Matthew-Hermann Tague sits down with Dr Paul Morrissey, President of Campion College Australia to discuss the theological and cardinal virtues in more detail. For details about the Campion Early Offer Scheme mentioned in this episode, go to www.campion.edu.au.

On the Season 4 premiere, Becky, Cam and Alicia dive into the carnal horrors of 1973 with the late Ivan Reitman's Cannibal Girls and Paul Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein (sometimes known as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Andy Warhol Presents The Frankencast! Put on your finest Serbian nasum and join us as we get super weird IN 3D! This week we're discussing flirtatious berating, what to do with life's gallbladder, and how to train your kids to carry on the family business. Please rate, review, and tell your fiends. And be sure to subscribe so you don't miss future installments. Follow us on Twitter or Instagram @thefrankencast or send us a letter at thefrankencast@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you! Your Horror Hosts: Anthony Bowman (he/him) & Eric Velazquez (he/him). Cover painting by Amanda Keller (@KellerIllustrations on Instagram).

For our sixth edition of our official club podcast, All About R's hosts Paul Morrissey and Andy Sinton are delighted to be joined by Trust CEO Andy Evans as we look ahead to this weekend's Community Day.

Paul Morrissey's FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN is a film that works on multiple levels: it's both a horror movie and a comedy, a gorefest and imbued with erotica, a marriage of New York arthouse and Italian sleaze. A new favorite for the show, it stars Udo Kier and bears only a few degrees of separation from Andy Warhol, E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, former president Donald Trump, Madonna, and Korn. It's a wild movie and historically significant to boot.

Tom and Jenny discuss the campy, gory, Eurosleaze cult classic, written and directed by Paul Morrissey, produced by Andy Warhol, and starring Udo Kier and Joe Dallesandro. Find this movie and more at the 13 O’Clock Amazon Storefront! Audio version: Video version: Please support us on Patreon! Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, like us … Continue reading Movie Retrospective: Flesh For Frankenstein (1973)

Break out the wirgin daiquiris and snuggle up with your favourite gallbladder, because this week doing the monster mash has never been so debauched! Join the fun as Lori and Aria dive into two Andy Warhol-produced Paul Morrissey flicks with a look at camp masterpieces "Flesh for Frankenstein" (1973) and "Blood for Dracula" (1974).Audio clip from "The Whitest Kids U' Know" (2007). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Its a boutique blu-ray apocalypse as the DEADPIT boys (CK, Uncle Bill and Captain B Plan) along with Born2BeRad's Garrett... its a LIVE BUY Black Friday. Vinegar Syndrome's announcements, Severin's Bad Gateway, overpriced shit or wonderful films? All of this is discussed and much more in a 90 minutes of FURY special...PODCAST VERSION here on DEADPIT.com!

Paul always has a 5 minute TV clean set ready. He's been on the Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson 4 times, one at the last minute. He started out as a Sports Anchor and after a short stint teaching he decided to become a comedian.

In this episode, Bishop Richard and Silvana Scarfe speak with Dr Paul Morrissey, President of Campion College Australia, about the ins and outs of the liberal arts, the benefits of studying a liberal education and what Campion College offers, as Australia's first Liberal Arts college. To find out more about Campion College, click on this link: https://www.campion.edu.au/ (https://www.campion.edu.au/)

Ep. 4 Culturally Responsive and Affirming Schools Pt.2 (Show transcript)Ellen Willoughby (00:01):Hi, everyone. Welcome to Drinking From The Fire Hose, a podcast for school leaders. I'm your host, Ellen Willoughby. Being a campus leader can feel like you're drinking from a fire hose with all the information requests, tasks, and duties that are thrown your way on a daily basis. So how do you manage to do it all and help students grow? Well, that's what this podcast is all about.Welcome to part 2 in the conversation with Mera Dougherty on the topic of Culturally Responsive Schools.Mera Dougherty (00:17):Absolutely. I want to share another piece of data that according to the Hechinger Report, it's a national nonprofit newsroom and it reports on the only topic of education. And they say that educators who run US schools aren't a diverse group. Almost 80% of the nation's 90,000 principals are white. Only 11% are Black and 9% are Latino. And this is all according to federal data.Ellen Willoughby (00:46):This doesn't come close to reflecting the demographics of the nation's 50 million public school children who are 46% white, 15% Black, 28% Latino and 6% Asian. So I know that when we were chatting about having you as a guest on this topic, the first thing, and I knew that this was going to come up as you were like, "I'm a white lady who is a principal. And you're asking me to talk about cultural diversity." I want you to share a little bit more about why you thought that at the beginning and just kind of your thoughts overall on this data.Mera Dougherty (01:21):Sure. You know, I think the first important part of this is you have to acknowledge who you are as a leader, right? There needs to be cognizant of who you are as a leader. And I don't mean that in terms of, I think some folks use it as like, "Oh, you know, I'm sorry, I'm white." That's not what I'm saying. I am a white leader, and I need to be cognizant of the fact that there has been a huge amount of privilege that has allowed me into the position I currently am, or that I'm in. With that, I have to use that privilege to say, I am actively dedicated to creating pipelines, especially for leadership, right? If we look at that data for leadership, it's just really astounding, right? I will create pipelines for leadership and for my staff that make it equitable, right? That we have leaders coming into our schools, and that we have leadership pipelines that is valuing our leaders that are coming from the communities that we serve, right. That have some shared background with our students, and more than I can say I have.Mera Dougherty (02:24):And so I think what that means is, in a practical sense looking at your leadership teams, looking at things like the advisory board that we have at Compass Rose, looking at people like our assistant principals, our principals, our leadership pipelines within our teachers, right? How we advance folks, and making sure that we are really focusing on leaders that come from the communities we serve, and have that shared background.Mera Dougherty (02:49):And so as a white leader, it's something that I need to be doing that work actively. And I need to be doing it 10 times more than anybody else. And I need to know who I am, right. I need to be doing the work of actively exploring the biases that I have, making sure that I am using anti-racist practices in my schools. And then also realizing, I think with all of this, that even though we talk about school leadership, right, and I have this role of like principal or head of school. Like I said, before, you shouldn't be the person who's steering the boat all the time. Or if you are steering the boat, great. You're asking someone else where to go. Right? You are not just saying like, great, I'm steering the boat here. I've also like never really been on a boat that much. So I don't know if this is how boats work. You know, like driving the van, I guess, right?Mera Dougherty (03:43):Like if you're going to be driving the van you've got this leadership position. You're also not the person who's deciding where it goes, and how you get there, and when you're going to stop, right. That's not how it works. You need to have a team that reflects your community. And you need to have a team that is your community. That's telling you where to go, and how to get there, and is taking over the driving. And that eventually, you're really not needed in that driver's seat. Right? You're setting up the community to drive itself to wherever it needs to go. And so to me, that's what that data really says. Right? That's where we need to make this big shift.Ellen Willoughby (04:17):Yeah. So it's like, they are the GPS in a sense.Mera Dougherty (04:20):Yeah.Ellen Willoughby (04:20):And you're just following the directions.Mera Dougherty (04:23):Exactly. And then I'm using my privilege to get that right. To buy the van, and to get in that seat. But then I'm doing everything I can after that, to actually get myself out of the seat. Right? And that sounds strange. But I mean, you and I, we'll sit down and talk in five, 10 years. And when we do, and we're having coffee, ideally having non-socially distanced in five to 10 years, I would hope that you and I are sitting there and we're talking about the new principals at my school and how wonderful they are. And that these are people who are from the community that we serve or have shared background with our children. Right? And I am doing different work at that point because leaders like me should eventually become not useless, but to some extent very unique and not the folks that typically are in these roles.Mera Dougherty (05:16):I think we can shift this data if we shift our idea of leadership, again to culturally affirming, to looking for leaders who are from our community, to reflecting this culture within the schools that we build, and then valuing that. Actually putting a value proposition to say, when we hire, when we look for values that are important in our kids and our families and our teachers, we are using the values that were actually created by this community. We are not bringing in a separate set of things that we believe, that have nothing to do with the community we serve.Ellen Willoughby (05:49):Yeah. And that your students grow up to be the teachers and the leaders of your schools because they are in your community. And again, I think like really stamping that how we use our privilege. And that is the most important part. It's not a white savior thing at all. Not at all. It's about how do we use our privilege and how do we listen to those in the community to ensure that we are doing and using that privilege for what is in their best interest, and what they desire for their committee.Mera Dougherty (06:22):Absolutely. And I think when we talk about that privilege, what it means is a lot of times ask others. So get out of the way. Get out of the way. Be quiet, and let others share. Again, it goes back to that quote that that Celeste was saying. Like you have to do this work. You can't do this work without the community. Or you can't work for a community without the community. Get out of the way.Mera Dougherty (06:51):So for me, it's about you get that school open and then you listen. You listen to the people that are from there. You put the people who are from that community in charge. You make sure folks have a space to speak, a space to be listened to, and a real space of power where what they're saying is being turned in to action. And there's got to be an equity there. So if you have a position of power or any sort of sense of privilege, we need to use that privilege to get out of the way. Set up structures to get out of the way and let communities do the amazing things they actually have been wanting to do for years and just have had too much red tape to do it.Ellen Willoughby (07:29):Nice.Announcer (07:30):If you like what you hear in this episode, pop on over to whatever platform you use and give us a rating and review. It really helps people find our podcast and lets us know what we're doing right, and what we can improve upon. And of course, don't forget to mention this to your colleagues. Thanks. Now let's get back to the show.Ellen Willoughby (07:51):Talk about another hot topic around this, and one that you and I have both had really long conversations when we were together. So when we were on a campus together, one of the things that we really talked about is being culturally responsive, especially when it became to behavior interventions and discipline. So I love to hear a little bit about what your thinking is on that. It's a tough one, man.Mera Dougherty (08:20):It is. And we've been through that. I feel like you have seen me, gosh, I don't even know how many years. It's been a while, Ellen. But we've done that work together.Ellen Willoughby (08:26):Yes, it has been.Mera Dougherty (08:29):And so you've actually seen me do this wrong and I think you've seen me sort of like get to the point where we're starting to do it right. I don't think anyone's doing it right yet. Or I don't think, I believe. I believe when we are talking about making sure that we are affirming culture and that we're doing that through, I almost hate the word discipline because I think it's been just turned into something else.Ellen Willoughby (08:53):Definitely.Mera Dougherty (08:53):But when we're doing it with any sort of system we create within our school, especially our systems just of behavior. And I think it's culture, right? It's actually the culture of the school. Again, it goes back to do you know your community, right? Do you know what they value? Do you know what they want for their children? Et cetera. And then thinking about what are the practices that we say, what are the things that we believe kids must do every day? Here are the things that they must engage in every day. Here are the things they cannot do. Here are the things that we think are impeding their education. And then looking at those things continuously with the eye on where are these things coming from?Mera Dougherty (09:40):Again, are they reflecting the needs of the community? Are they reflecting what the hopes and dreams of our children and our families are? Are they going to get our kids to that place? Or, and this is where it's really difficult to sort of suss out, are the things we're expecting from children and are saying are right or wrong, did we put those in place because of white privilege, white fragility? Are those systems and structures in place because it was just easier, right? You know, kids being in certain kinds of lines. Kids being quiet during certain times. Was it just easier for us? And like, that's okay too. We got to admit that.Ellen Willoughby (10:19):Yeah, we do. I mean, definitely there's a level of control that we feel that we have to have, or it's going to be like Lord of the Flies. But we also know that that's probably not going to happen.Mera Dougherty (10:31):Especially because kids are great, right?Ellen Willoughby (10:33):Yes, kids are amazing.Mera Dougherty (10:35):They're humans and they actually don't... We have to remember, there's this idea about what will and won't happen with children when we let control go, or when we think of changing a system. We have to remember, all humans want to be loved. Right? They want to do the right thing. And sometimes there are things that get in the way of that, which is like their immediate needs aren't being met. They aren't fed. They don't have a roof. There's something that their immediate needs aren't being met yet. So we need to meet those first.Mera Dougherty (11:08):Sometimes it's they actually don't know what the right thing is and where we think it's so obvious. We're like, duh, this is the right thing. And I don't know how many times I've seen a teacher do that. I myself have done that in areas of like, "Well, of course you don't do this." And you see a kid's face and you're like, "Oh, so you didn't know that. You did not know that there was a different choice in that moment? Cool. Let's like talk about that first." Right?Mera Dougherty (11:32):But there's these roadblocks to having kids do what's right sometimes. And I think what it's really about is actively letting kids know, and teaching, here are the values that we hold dear. Here's how you show them every day already. Right? You actually already have these values in them, because again, they're important to your community. They're part of the fabric of who you are. They're a part of your history. And then here's how we build on those, right? Here's how we make really good choices, or choices that will get us to not where I want you to be in your life, but where you want to be in your life. Here's how you can use those values to make those choices. And here's what happens when you don't make them, and some really natural consequences that come with those. Punitive measures of punishment, we've got to get over these.Ellen Willoughby (12:23):Yeah. I mean, if we think about it as adults, like there are times we don't meet a deadline. There are times that we screw something up and nobody sends us home or makes us stay after work and get it done. And I know that part of that, we're helping kids build their own knowledge and their own self-awareness and self-management through this. But if it's reactive and it's not a natural consequence to that, are we really teaching them something?Mera Dougherty (13:01):I mean, I would say no. And again, it's a little messier. When we're thinking about systems of culture, or creating the culture of a school. And when I say that, I mean creating behavioral systems. Where we typically have gone wrong is creating these stringent, this is what's right. This is what's wrong. Here's what kids must do. Here's what kids can't do. And especially in charter schools, right, I think it's important to just call out this fact. There's no tolerance policy, which actually doesn't refer to anything specific. People have used it, no excuses, zero tolerance. People throw these things around.Mera Dougherty (13:45):The issue with that is most of the things that we put on that list are very white normative, and usually pretty racist ideas, right? We have not considered the background of our children. Again, we have not asked that question to our community. What do you want for your children? What's important to you? I think a great example of this is when we think about how we allow kids to speak in a classroom and thinking about the tone of voice that they use, or the volume, et cetera.Mera Dougherty (14:16):Well, when I think of the conversations I've had with families recently, there has been this idea of advocacy. Families want for their children to be able to advocate, advocate for themselves, and to advocate for their community. Great. I think that's wonderful too. Well then how in the world am I telling a child that your voice level needs to be at a whisper in the classroom, and that it's rude to disagree with someone. Like, no, we actually need to teach children how to actively engage in tough conversations, right? And how do we have a discussion without raising our hands, right? How does that naturally happen?Mera Dougherty (14:56):Because if we want kids who are going to be the next lawmakers, who are going to be people who are on a political stage advocating, they need to know how to be in a conversation where they're not raising their hand and speaking out of whisper. They need to know how to raise and lower their voice. They need to know how to modulate their volume and they need to be able to explore that within a classroom. Not be punished for it.Mera Dougherty (15:20):So again, I believe that we need to look back at our systems and again, use that same tool of what is it people want for their children? What is it children want to be themselves? What are the highest positions of power that we need to tell our children are open to them, right? And then are we creating systems of behavior that get our kids to that place that tell our kids, yes, you can advocate for yourself. Yes, you can ask questions.Mera Dougherty (15:52):Because I tell you when our kids go to the Ivy League school of their choice, they're going to need to be able to go to their professors and ask questions after class. And they're going to need to be able to push back on the ideas of their peers. And if they never learned that because we told them it's wrong, that's going to be a problem. Right?Ellen Willoughby (16:11):Yeah. Because our current kind of behavior system is really all about compliance. It's really all about in a lot of ways what makes it easier for the teacher.Mera Dougherty (16:23):Yes.Ellen Willoughby (16:24):Where there's not a true engagement of students. And again, like you said, them learning to use their voice, whatever that voice is. And also letting them know that their voice is important, and matters, and should be heard just as much as the student sitting next to them.Mera Dougherty (16:45):Absolutely. And I think as a leader, the way that you can do that, because look, I've been a teacher. I've been a teacher in Brooklyn, and Harlem, and Austin, really across South to North.Ellen Willoughby (16:57):You've done it all.Mera Dougherty (16:58):We've been there, as have you. And I know how tough it is. I know how tough it is to be a teacher. And it is so much easier to create these really stringent rules. This is what happens when you don't do this. This happens next. I get that. And I have been there.Ellen Willoughby (17:15):Oh yeah, absolutely.Mera Dougherty (17:17):As a leader, we can really help teachers, and educators, and help ourselves by saying, okay, let's go back to these values that we believe were important. Let's go back to what we believe kids must do in a school. Kids can do. Kids cannot do. Let's continuously go back to these lists. Let's go back to them with our teachers. Let's go back to them with our families and with our community. And then let's make sure to reinforce to our staff and to our community that here's what we want to see. Right? And where some of it's going to be messy and that's okay. Right? Here's where some of the mess is. Of course, as a leader, I have to say there needs to be some safety.Ellen Willoughby (17:57):Absolutely. Yes. It's not the idea of we don't have rules. We don't have expectations.Mera Dougherty (18:04):But there is this idea of, here's what we're expecting. And here's where we're okay with things looking a little bit different. So that teachers don't have a false expectation in their head of, Oh my gosh, someone's going to come in and observe my classroom and they're going to see that kids are talking over each other because we're in a unit right now where we're really learning how to have active discussion in class. And they're going to be upset with me.Mera Dougherty (18:28):We need to, as leaders, make sure that we really communicate here's what we're expecting to see. Here's what it's going to look like on the way. And then we're going to have discussions with you about it, and we're going to be working with you. We're going to be working as a school, and as a community together to figure out how to get there. And sometimes it's going to be messy. But there isn't going to be this sense of like divine retribution, right? Like that's not how this is going to work. We're working on this together, and we're going to figure out how it works, and we're going to make missteps. But here's what we're all aiming to do. And giving that vision of like, this is what our community wants. Okay. Here's how we're going to move together towards getting it. And here's how we're going to modulate and shift when it doesn't go right.Ellen Willoughby (19:10):And having the community be a part of that is huge because that's what we need. We need for that connection and that partnership of our families with our schools. Because then when there are things that feel a little bit outside of our locus of control in helping a student, we reach out to the family, because they know that kid better than we do. And they know ways that they can support, and help us support in the classroom.Mera Dougherty (19:38):Absolutely.Ellen Willoughby (19:40):Wow. This has been so fun. So what I want to do is ask a piece of advice question. So what advice would you give to leaders who are just starting out exploring how to create a culturally responsive school? Just kind of final thoughts on that?Mera Dougherty (19:59):Sure. So one, for leaders that are exploring that, one, like way to go, right? The first thing you need to do is pat yourself on the back and say, it's a tough time in education right now. And there's a million things you could be thinking of. And I know that if I was a younger leader at this time, I probably would say, Oh my gosh, that's like something I need.Ellen Willoughby (20:20):Right. I'm trying to figure out how to do synchronous and asynchronous learning. And I'm trying to do 90,000 other things in a pandemic.Mera Dougherty (20:28):Absolutely. Yes. So good for you. And know that this work is important, and it's not work that can be done next year. It's not work that can be done next week because you're always going to have, if you haven't realized this already, especially for our newer leaders. I'm so sorry, this is your life, right? This is a pandemic, and so it makes crazier than normal. But this is your life all the time. There's always going to be something else happening. There's always going to be a fire burning somewhere. And the first piece of advice is just, way to go for doing this work. It needs to be done now.Mera Dougherty (21:01):Two. The second piece of advice would be again, like go on a listening tour, find a way to make it work with the current workload you have. Right? So find something that is on your plate right now, whether it be a drive-through event that you need to host for your school, whether it be a big curriculum question that has been sort of on your mind burning there, something about what your kids need, et cetera. Find something that you can sort of mesh with this community listening, so that you have a way to listen to the community, but also feel like, okay, I'm getting something done off my list, right?Mera Dougherty (21:41):And set those blocks for yourself every week, where you have to speak to people from the community, and at the same time, you can get something done. Eventually you're going to get to the point where there's a week you don't need to get something done, and you're going to have some very cool conversations. But that's okay. I'm assuming no, one's there yet. If you are, my name is Mera, you contact me. You let me know what you're doing.Mera Dougherty (22:04):But find a way to do that. And don't be scared. You know, I was initially really scared to reach out to some of the people in my community. Right? Even though this is my backyard. People want to talk. Especially right now, you can literally... I just sent emails. "Hey, my name is Mera Dougherty. I'm founding a school at Manor. I just want to hear about your community." Or if I had a specific question like, "I really want to know more about what is it you envision for your children in the future? What kind of school do you want in your community? Or what kind of event would you want for this fall?" Whatever it is, send a bunch of emails out, right?Mera Dougherty (22:43):Just find people's emails. Go on LinkedIn. Go on Facebook and send them Facebook messages. I didn't Facebook till this year. Now I Facebook. Right? So like send them some Facebook messages. People will get back to you. They want to talk to you. And then find a mode of talking to you them every week so that you can start to get a pulse on what your community wants and needs. If you start that the rest of it will come, right? The rest of it, you are going to start to see like, Oh my gosh, I can now solve this problem with these people from the community. Oh my goodness. There is a way that I can incorporate what I heard from this person that I talked to last week into what I'm doing this next week.Mera Dougherty (23:24):It's going to naturally shift what you do. So that is my biggest piece of advice is start there. Start with listening to your community. Start with giving your community that platform. And then if you want to start building on that, think about how you're actually validating the beliefs and the dreams of your community, and how are you giving your community a platform. Right?Mera Dougherty (23:44):That's that third step that I would start to think about, is are you really, now that you're listening, are you giving them the stage? Right? And if you're not, then start to think about that. But get the first two down, right? Start it. Start the work. You've got to start it now.Ellen Willoughby (23:59):Right. You've just got to start.Mera Dougherty (24:00):And start listening. Right? Start those two first. Then start giving people the stage.Ellen Willoughby (24:04):Great. Are there any resources that you recommend, books for people to read, or at this point, just start there, and then?Mera Dougherty (24:12):Honestly, I think there are so many books, right? Just as I was driving here... Not as I was driving. Before I was driving, I was like, "Oh, I need to read this book," and was ordering it to my house. I think there are so many books right now. There are so many incredible leaders that are speaking about this right now.Mera Dougherty (24:31):I'm going to take sort of an oppositional viewpoint to that. You're probably already doing that. Right? Most of the leaders I know are reading a million books. They're doing all those things. You're probably doing that right now. And you can find those lists other places. I, as a white leader in Texas, I actually am probably not the person to ask. Ask somebody who is in your community what books to read, what texts to dive into, what trainings to go to.Mera Dougherty (24:57):I'm not the person to tell you. I think the place to start, again, is your community. And they're going to tell you those things. The book I got this morning was something that somebody told me yesterday.Ellen Willoughby (25:06):Great.Mera Dougherty (25:07):Ask them.Ellen Willoughby (25:07):Yes. There you go. So as we do with each of our podcasts, we're going to end with, we have a seven short answer questions with an educational twist that I just want you to just kind of fire off your thoughts.Mera Dougherty (25:20):Oh, fun.Ellen Willoughby (25:21):So as an educator, what keeps you up at night?Mera Dougherty (25:25):That eternal question, right? Are we/have we done everything we possibly could for our kids?Ellen Willoughby (25:31):As an educator? What allows you to sleep at night?Mera Dougherty (25:34):Getting to see my kids the next day. I mean, it's like different right now. But typically there's that moment when you get to school and kids start coming in. Right? And it's such a joyful moment. And so when I am like, okay, Mera, it is time to conk out. That's what I think about.Ellen Willoughby (25:52):What sound or noise do you love to hear in a school?Mera Dougherty (25:56):Educators and kids participating in things together. So I don't care if it's, like laughing together is the best. But also like when you have that first heartbreaking novel that a sixth grade class reads together and the teacher and the kids are all in tears. Right? So it sounds so weird. And you walk by their class and they're all experiencing this emotion, this like moment together. Or they experience their first time there's like a political disagreement in the class. And they're getting to experience that together. But when you can see the adults and the kids in the building experiencing something together for the first time.Ellen Willoughby (26:33):What sound or noise do you hate to hear in a school?Mera Dougherty (26:35):Suspicious silence. You know that, Ellen. You know that silence. You know that silence. It's like middle school transition time. And all of a sudden you're like, "Why is it so quiet?" And you know something is wrong.Ellen Willoughby (26:50):That is the greatest answer. What is your favorite word in education?Mera Dougherty (26:58):This is so hard. Paul Morrissey, our founder, uses a term the joy love thing. And really, I love that. Right? The idea that we need to take so much joy because this is the best profession in the world, right? Like this is hard. But this is the best. We get to do the best work every day. And we need to bring so much joy to it. And the fact that we are here to love each other and love our kids. That sounds weird, and people get super creeped out. But you know this from working with me. I'm going to tell you, I love you. Ellen. I love you. You know, I love you. I love the kids we serve. I love the families we serve. And I just love when you get to a place where you've got a community that is joyful and like loves on each other every day. You have done something right. It's my favorite saying.Ellen Willoughby (27:47):That's also how you get the hard work done too.Mera Dougherty (27:49):And it becomes not so hard then. When you really love each other, it's like, okay, I will do this for you because you are so great, and I want to see you learn, right?Ellen Willoughby (27:59):Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. What is your least favorite word in education?Mera Dougherty (28:10):These are actually words that I believe in, but I think have just been so misused. One would be structure, right? It's not that I don't believe in structure. Actually I totally believe in structure. You know this from working with me.Ellen Willoughby (28:23):Yes.Mera Dougherty (28:25):But it's just been, I don't know if I can say bastardize, but the word has become something very different than what it means. And accountability. I believe highly in accountability. I think people should be accountable, but I think the way that we use it now is actually this very judgmental, blaming thing, which is not what it's meant to be. So those two words, when I hear them, they always raise my flag to like, "Ooh, this is going to not be something great." Like typically when they're used, it's almost how we talk about what kids come in with, right? That conversation typically goes not the right way. And those two words, typically when I hear them used are being used to talk about real negative thing.Ellen Willoughby (29:12):Yeah. And give people like a visceral reaction, as opposed to like an open-minded thought that this is something that can be really good and really helpful and powerful in a really positive way.Mera Dougherty (29:22):Yeah. Like take accountability for the awesome thing you did. But take accountability for that learning that you, child, put in and that your brain got so much bigger. Take accountability teacher for this beautiful classroom environment that you made. We never hear it. I'm going to say, I have never heard those sentences.Ellen Willoughby (29:38):No. No.Mera Dougherty (29:39):I don't know about you, but I've never heard those sentences.Ellen Willoughby (29:41):No,Mera Dougherty (29:42):We do hear accountability in terms of like, you need to take accountability for this misaction that you made. Right? You need to take accountability for these negative things, which those should come too> but that's not what accountability means. Accountability, like this sense of ownership over what you do. Also like let's take accountability for your ability to change. Have you ever heard that? I've never heard that.Ellen Willoughby (30:03):Nobody said that to me.Mera Dougherty (30:04):No one's saying that to me, and I don't hear our kids saying like, "Oh, I would love to take accountability to make that change."Ellen Willoughby (30:11):How powerful would that be?Mera Dougherty (30:13):Yeah. Versus like, I have heard people speak down to kids, like, "You need to take accountability for what you did." That's great. So take accountability, say "Yes, I did it." That's what you want? Like, that was your big aha moment for a child was or for a teacher was you got someone to say, "Yes 'twas I. I did it. It me." Like no! So those words, they drive me up the wall.Ellen Willoughby (30:38):Okay. And who was your favorite teacher and why?Mera Dougherty (30:43):This was really hard. This one was like the hardest. I was really struggling to think about this, and I came up with two really different people. One of whom I'm not totally sure how it came into my head. So one is really obvious. His name was Mr. Mark Flamoe. I have realized I probably need to look him up at this point and send him an email. But he was a teacher at the high school that I went to, Jesuit High school in Portland, Oregon, which was just a really phenomenal place of instruction. And he was the first person, along with, I think he was our principal at the time, paul Hogan, that made me love literature.Mera Dougherty (31:21):I was someone who grew up. I went to a school, we spoke Spanish first. And so I was a really bad reader in English. And I shouldn't say that. I was a developing reader in English. But the way it was described back then was like, she couldn't read. Right? I was not a reader. I remember someone telling me that in like fourth grade, being like, "She is not a reader."Ellen Willoughby (31:42):So that's a really positive thing to put into a fourth graders head.Mera Dougherty (31:45):That was normal back then.Ellen Willoughby (31:46):Oh, it totally was.Mera Dougherty (31:47):A non-reader. And I caught up because I found books that I loved on my own. Right? Just sort of like salacious teen novels. But he was the first person that showed me how to dig into it. Like open a book and dig into the prose that was there. Dig into the writing, and figure out how to sort of be... Lucy Calkins talks about this too. How do dig into a text and explore it and love that process. And I never understood it until him, and my principal at the time. Both of them really worked together on this very cool and robust English curriculum. So that was great.Mera Dougherty (32:23):The other teacher, I don't know why she popped in my head. But was this woman named Sister Jackie. She was a middle school teacher of mine. And she got me in like huge trouble all the time.Ellen Willoughby (32:37):She got you in huge trouble?Mera Dougherty (32:43):Good point. I got myself in trouble. That was pre-existing middle school and has existed far beyond that. But I was always in trouble with her. That's the better way to say it, thank you. Taking accountability for my actions, Ellen. I was always in trouble with Sister Jackie. But she was the first person, I think, that made me realize that she could really like me. And at the same time, like she knew what was up. Right? Like she knew what I was doing, and I think for me, it formed a lot of the ideas I had, especially that I use now in terms of, we need to, again, sort of like accountability. That's how I've sort of revised that idea. It's like, we need to love kids and let them know no matter what they do, we're going to love them. My love is not conditional on anything for my children. The minute they step in that door, I love them period. And if they leave that door, I still love them period.Mera Dougherty (33:51):But there are going to be moments where they just do something crazy. And that's okay. Right? Like I'm here for it. One, it may be kind of funny, right? It may be enjoyable. It may be really not enjoyable. It may be really uncomfortable. And we're going to have a moment where we talk about it, right? We're going to have some moment where we need to figure this out, but it is not going to make me love you less. And so I think she was the first person that made me realize that in education. And now that is a really important concept to me with our kids.Ellen Willoughby (34:22):Well, Mera, I cannot thank you enough for you sharing your knowledge with us today, and on this really incredibly important topic. And also just the great laughs as well. And we want to thank all of our listeners for joining us for this episode of Drinking from the Firehose, a podcast for campus leaders. If you liked what you heard on this episode today, please hop over to whatever platform you use and give us a rating and review. It helps people find our podcasts and lets us know what we're doing right, and what we can improve upon. And, of course, don't forget to mention this to your colleagues. Thanks again.

Guest: President of Campion College, Dr Paul Morrissey.