Podcast appearances and mentions of Valerie Solanas

Lili Taylor steps Behind the Rope. Lili is here to mention it all and chat about the full anthology of her career which now includes the moniker Author thanks to the just released “Turning To Birds”. Lili chats about her breakout performance with Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza, her well deserved crown of 90s "indie darling” and TV highs such as Outer Range, Six Feet Under and American Crime.  Speaking of “indie darling”, Lili discusses her brilliant performance as Valerie Solanas in I Shot Andy Warhol. Of course, we dish on “other indies darling” Parker Posey, White Lotus and starring in Four Rooms alongside Madonna, whom she happened to meet for the first time when she was twelve! @lilittaylor @behindvelvetrope @davidyontef BONUS & AD FREE EPISODES Available at - ⁠www.patreon.com/behindthevelvetrope⁠  BROUGHT TO YOU BY: STRAWBERRY - ⁠Strawberry.me/VELVET ⁠(Claim Your $50 Credit Today Because Your Career Success Shouldn't Wait) MEANINGFUL BEAUTY - ⁠meaningfulbeauty.com/velvet⁠ (Get 25% Off Cindy Crawford's Beauty Line & The Targeted Treatment Duo GIFT SET for FREE) CARAWAY HOME - ⁠Carawayhome.com/VELVET⁠ (10% Off Non-Toxic Cookware Made Modern) RO - ⁠ro.co/velvet⁠ (For Your Free Insurance Coverage Check On Prescription Compounded GLP-1s) MY LIFE IN A BOOK - ⁠mylifeinabook.com ⁠(Use Code Velvet For 15% Off To Create a Unique Gift For Mother's Day)  DELETEME - (Get 20% Off By Texting VELVET to 64000 - To Take Control Of Your Data & Keep Your Private Life Private) RAKUTEN - ⁠rakuten.com⁠ (Get the Rakuten App NOW and Join the 17 Million Members Who Are Already Saving! Your Cash Back really adds up!) INDEED - ⁠indeed.com/velvet⁠ (Seventy Five Dollar $75 Sponsored Job Credit To Get Your Jobs More Visibility)  WASHINGTON RED RASPBERRIES - ⁠Redrazz.org⁠ (Find New Ways To Use American Frozen Red Raspberries & Get More Details On Where You Can Grab a Bag) WARBY PARKER - ⁠www.warbyparker.com/velvet⁠ (Try On Any Pair of Glasses Virtually or Visit One of Their Over 270 Locations) ADVERTISING INQUIRIES - Please contact ⁠David@advertising-execs.com⁠ MERCH Available at - ⁠https://www.teepublic.com/stores/behind-the-velvet-rope?ref_id=13198 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, I'm re-releasing one of my all-time favorite episodes of The Art of Crime, "Shooting Andy Warhol: Valerie Solanas." It originally aired ac ouple years back, during seasons 2 of the podcast, Assassins. It looks at how playwright, writer, and all-around hellraiser Valerie Solanas shot and nearly killed Andy Warhol in 1968. For show notes and full transcripts, visit www.artofcrimepodcast.com.  If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/artofcrimepodcast.    

Kunstenaar, schrijver en performer Eva Bartels begon vijf jaar geleden aan een monsterklus: in tien theatrale voorstellingen eert ze het werk van pionierende, vrouwelijke kunstenaars. Onlangs rondde ze de derde voorstelling in die reeks af, genaamd All Men Must Die. Vertrekpunt is het feministische S.C.U.M.-manifest van Valerie Solanas: een vlijmscherp pleidooi voor een maatschappij zonder kapitalisme én zonder mannen, dat door Eva een nieuwe interpretatie krijgt.  Voor de vierde voorstelling duikt ze in het leven en werk van de Cubaans-Amerikaanse Ana Mendieta, die zich richtte op een spirituele en fysieke band met de aarde. In de geest van Mendieta's werk liet Eva zich meerdere keren levend begraven, en ontdekte daardoor een nieuwe, mentale ruimte.  

Breanne Fahs - Valerie Solanas, the unwitting Icon of FeminismFeb 28, 2023Dr Breanne Fahs joins Ed Opperman to talk about Valerie Solanas, one of the trailblazers of the feminist movement.Too drastic, too crazy, too "out there," too early, too late, too damaged, too much—Valerie Solanas has been dismissed but never forgotten. She has become, unwittingly, a figurehead for women's unexpressed rage, and stands at the center of many worlds. She inhabited Andy Warhol's Factory scene, circulated among feminists and the counter cultural underground, charged men money for conversation, despised "daddy's girls," and outlined a vision for radical gender dystopia. Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the polemical diatribe SCUM Manifesto, Solanas is one of the most famous women of her era.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

Sie sind obszön, lassen Globi twerken und philosophieren über Valerie Solanas. Morgen Abend spielen Jessica Jurassica & Mia Nägeli als CAPSLOCK SUPERSTAR im Rahmen des 'Queer Saturday' im Humbug, ab 20:30 Uhr. Für lost souls und aktivistische Crowds, die wissen, dass Argumente manchmal besser mit Beats unterstrichen werden. von Mirco Kaempf

You can learn more about Art of Crime Podcast on their website.Direct link to Art of Crime Podcast's episode on Valerie Solanas. You can find Art of Crime Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube, and Instagram.ArtMuse's Two Part Episode on Edie Sedgwick will be available on all listening platforms on December 20, 2024 & January 3, 2025. ArtMuse is produced by Kula Production Company.Today's episode was written by me, your host, Grace Anna.I have included images, resources and suggestions for further reading on the ArtMuse website and Instagram.

Formed in 2004 The Old Ceremony has survived longer than many marriages. They've reinvented themselves again and again, beginning as an eleven-piece mini-orchestra, slimming down to a five-piece touring machine (guitar, bass, drums, vibraphone/keys, violin), and now –  in their 20th year together – creating a fresh, energized record that incorporates the visceral (“Valerie Solanas”), the meditative (“North American Grain”), the philosophical (“Too Big To Fail”), and a nod back to their noir-ish beginnings (“Lonely Mayor”). Songwriter and vocalist/guitarist Django Haskins' gift for incisive, colorful lyrics and melodies is on full display throughout, whether it be an unhinged first-person tale of shooting Andy Warhol or the melancholy last act of a long-closeted politician. He writes with empathy and precision that occasionally calls to mind the source of the band's name, Leonard Cohen, among others. In fact, the songs contained in Earthbound are culled from the 115 new songs Haskins penned during the pandemic. When tossed into the well-seasoned cauldron of the band's collective musical voices, they transform from one person's songs into something else: the sound of a band that has created together for two decades, through highs and lows, busy years of touring and slow years of child-rearing and mask wearing.  The Old Ceremony has seen their share of highlights: sharing bills with the Jayhawks, CAKE, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Mountain Goats, Chuck Berry, Giant Sand, and many more; touring the U.S., Canada, and Europe; building their stature in the fertile Chapel Hill/Durham scene one cinematic performance at a time. Meanwhile band leader Django Haskins in addition to participating in the Big Star tribute tours, co-wrote and recorded an album of Folk-Rock originals with the Jayhawks' Gary Louris under the name “Au Pair.” Earthbound is destined to be another highlight to add to the list, a musical recommitment ceremony among five musicians who share a life in song.       The Old Ceremony's info  www.theoldceremony.com www.facebook.com/theoldceremony www.instagram.com/theoldceremonyofficial https://open.spotify.com/artist/21PmWnK0ROD7G4nGvYCmDj  

Bram E. Gieben takes a deep dive into the revolutionary feminist writing of Valerie Solanas and Sarah Kane, and what it means for men. This is a preview. To listen to full episodes of Strange Exiles, sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠strangeexiles.substack.com

alerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol)Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

Join our poetry Salon and Open Mic: https://parallax-media-network.mn.co/share/5hSLvQW7bNszFGEo?utm_source=manual About David Herz: Hello. My names are David Salzmann Herz. I was born in Boston 70 years ago when McCarthy was getting his comeuppance. I lived with my family somewhere in Massachusetts before moving to Belo Horizonte, Brazil , as part of the Department of the Interior's Punto Quatro program where my father was instrumental in mapping the geology and training a generation of Brazilian geologists. I began writing aged ten at the American school of Sao Paolo which had scorpions in the sandbox. I won a turtle for my prose. Then we lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland before moving to Athens, Ga. Where I met the poet Colman Barks and other luminaries. I moved to Chicago and studied briefly under Del Close at Second City and David Mamet who was then directing the Goodman Theater. As well as Richard McKeon at the University of Chicago who taught Susan Sontag among others. Then I returned home and drove a car from Selma, Alabama to Warminster Pennsylvania, possibly damaging the transmission while accelerating against the snow and ice. The next three years in a bankrupt New York City were richness incarnate. I worked at the Oh Ho So restaurant in SoHo and as a busboy served Harry Belafonte, one of the reasons God created humans, a glass of water. I had Alice Notley, poetess supreme, for a teacher and read my prose work at the Saint Marks in the Bowery Poetry Project. Those were wild times, buildings burning, trash uncollected, rapes a'plenty, and great generosity from compassionate lawyers, doctors and dentists for the impoverished lot we were. You could easily meet people such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, John Giorno, Ted Berrigan, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Fred Sherry, Nam June Paik, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Bernstein, Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, Eileen Myles, Ted Greenwald, John Cale, Lydia Lunch, Alan Vega, and avoid others such as Valerie Solanas. And then just as I was about to join a rock and roll band I moved to Paris. It's been 45 years. Odd jobs subtitling movies and Sipa Photopress Agency photographs. Doing journalism for English language papers, interviewing the B- 52's, Peter Brook, Zouc, Herbert Achternbusch, Paul Lederman, Boris Bergman and then working for Bull and Alcatel two fine French corporations employing hundreds of thousands who equally vanished into the capitalist sunset. Thanks to a flutist friend in Ircam I got to meet Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez but I don't think they remember me. I did a translation for Sophie Calle before she became Sophie Calle. Also some work for the Royal family of Afghanistan. Back when there was one. At Paris VIII University still in the Bois de Vincennes with the whores whom we did not try to lead to culture I got to attend classes by Lyotard & Deleuze and the Miller Brothers, Lacan's son in laws? Noam Chosmky spoke. I thought to become a consultant in a moment of delusion and ended up teaching for the last 24 years: Polytechnique, SciencesPo, ENST, INT, Supelec, Ecole Centrale, ENPC, ENSTA, Paris V, ICP, ESIEE, ECE, Ecole du Louvre. Before that I was a technical translator, a field I am happy to report that has been almost entirely taken over by machines, bless their soulless bodies. I also got married and my wife and I had two children. But we hadn't really grown up much to the needless suffering of the children and so that marriage went painfully bust...Then I married again and we had a daughter. She's on the phone right now, de rigueur for all 16 year olds. I am a loving observer of the human experiment of which I am inextricably a part, how so ever much I would like to be apart. As we advance, not necessarily progress, into the numbing, memory erasing age of AI, already sinking its canines deep into our pranic jugulars, lose ourselves in our beloved electronic devices, we must look to our hands, our analog writing devices such as pencils and pens and give them a try. Along with all the rest.

In this wild episode of Framed, Steph and Joel dive into the notorious 1968 shooting of pop art icon Andy Warhol. From his rise as a cultural superstar to the moment he was nearly taken out by radical feminist Valerie Solanas, we uncover the bizarre and gripping story behind the shocking event that rocked the art world. What pushed Solanas to shoot one of the most famous artists of all time? And how did Warhol's near-death experience forever change the course of his life and work? Get ready for a rollercoaster ride through 1960s New York—a world of fame, radical politics, and glittering dysfunction. This is the story of how Andy Warhol's life hung by a thread…and the woman who pulled the trigger.Keep up to date on all things social Framed Podcast: @framedthepodJoel: @joeldavid_bSteph: @cheersthanxalot Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Radical Feminist Retrospective revisits some of the earliest episodes of Radical Feminist Perspectives, now available on Spotify for the first time. Episode 30 - 'The SCUM Manifesto' by Valerie Solanas, discussed by Marian Rutigliano, Jo Brew, Sheila Jeffreys, Caroline Norma and Holly Lawford-Smith. First broadcast 6th February 2022. Part of our webinar series Radical Feminist Perspectives, offering a chance to hear leading feminists discuss radical feminist theory and politics. Register at https://bit.ly/registerRFP.

Heute vor 56 Jahren schoss Valerie Solanas auf den weltberühmten Popart-Künstler Andy Warhol und verletzte ihn lebensgefährlich. Schauplatz war die „Factory“ in Manhattan, die Warhol und seinem privaten und künstlerischem Umfeld als Atelier, Filmstudio, Partylocation und auch Wohnort diente. Man arbeitete und feierte dort mit einem schillernden Mix an Szeneleuten, Kreativen, Künstlern und Prominenten. Stellt sich also die Frage, wer war Valerie Solanas -die heute als Ikone des Radikal-Feminismus bezeichnet wird- und in welcher Beziehung stand sie zu dem Künstler? Und welche Rolle spielte das S.C.U.M. Manifest?

La réalisatrice, journaliste, écrivaine et actrice française Ovidie pour son docu "J'ai tiré sur Andy Warhol - Scum Manifesto", à voir sur arte.tv jusqu'au 25 octobre. Le 3 juin 1968, à la Factory, elle a blessé grièvement Andy Warhol de plusieurs coups de feu, gagnant ironiquement le quart d'heure de célébrité qu'il promettait à tous. Connue à l'époque en tant qu'actrice, Valerie Solanas se définit comme une autrice. Elle a achevé en 1967 un brûlot misandre, Scum Manifesto, le premier terme signifiant Society for Cutting up Men, en français "société pour tailler les hommes en pièces" (ou pour les émasculer). Un texte écrit "du plus profond des marées puantes du patriarcat", dit-elle. Née en 1936 dans le New Jersey, elle en connaît un rayon sur la domination masculine. Battue par son grand-père, violée par son père – un inceste dont naîtra une fille qu'on fera passer pour sa sœur –, elle met au monde à 16 ans un fils, possible fruit d'une étreinte avec un marin de passage. Cette jeune fille intelligente se rebiffe alors, et cède le bébé à un couple infertile en échange de la prise en charge de ses études à l'université. Elle en sort avec une licence de psychologie et un profond rejet du sexisme académique. Direction New York où, dans l'effervescence de Greenwich Village, elle vivote, écrit et se prostitue. En mal de reconnaissance, elle fréquente Andy Warhol et sa cour, jouant dans ses films contre un cachet de misère. Elle se sent exploitée par l'artiste, et par son éditeur, qui lui a extorqué les droits de Scum Manifesto. Il ne publiera le texte qu'à la faveur du scandale. Le talk-show culturel de Jérôme Colin. Avec, dès 11h30, La Bagarre dans la Discothèque, un jeu musical complétement décalé où la créativité et la mauvaise foi font loi. À partir de midi, avec une belle bande de chroniqueurs, ils explorent ensemble tous les pans de la culture belge et internationale sans sacralisation, pour découvrir avec simplicité, passion et humour. Merci pour votre écoute Entrez sans Frapper c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 11h30 à 13h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes de Entrez sans Frapper sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/8521 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Les sorties BD de Xavier Vanbuggenhout : - « Dog Biscuits » d'Alex Graham (Presque Lune) - « On est en finale » de Camille Blandin (Misma) - « Sacré Dieu ! » de Frédéric Lenoir et Anne Lise Combeaud (Rue de Sèvres) La réalisatrice, journaliste, écrivaine et actrice française Ovidie pour le docu "J'ai tiré sur Andy Warhol - Scum Manifesto", à voir sur arte.tv jusqu'au 25 octobre. Le 3 juin 1968, à la Factory, elle a blessé grièvement Andy Warhol de plusieurs coups de feu, gagnant ironiquement le quart d'heure de célébrité qu'il promettait à tous. Connue à l'époque en tant qu'actrice, Valerie Solanas se définit comme une autrice. Elle a achevé en 1967 un brûlot misandre, Scum Manifesto, le premier terme signifiant Society for Cutting up Men, en français "société pour tailler les hommes en pièces" (ou pour les émasculer). Un texte écrit "du plus profond des marées puantes du patriarcat", dit-elle. Née en 1936 dans le New Jersey, elle en connaît un rayon sur la domination masculine. Battue par son grand-père, violée par son père – un inceste dont naîtra une fille qu'on fera passer pour sa sœur –, elle met au monde à 16 ans un fils, possible fruit d'une étreinte avec un marin de passage. Cette jeune fille intelligente se rebiffe alors, et cède le bébé à un couple infertile en échange de la prise en charge de ses études à l'université. Elle en sort avec une licence de psychologie et un profond rejet du sexisme académique. Direction New York où, dans l'effervescence de Greenwich Village, elle vivote, écrit et se prostitue. En mal de reconnaissance, elle fréquente Andy Warhol et sa cour, jouant dans ses films contre un cachet de misère. Elle se sent exploitée par l'artiste, et par son éditeur, qui lui a extorqué les droits de Scum Manifesto. Il ne publiera le texte qu'à la faveur du scandale. "Machins Machines" d'Hélène Maquet : ChatGPT et la voix de Scarlett Johansson. Le talk-show culturel de Jérôme Colin. Avec, dès 11h30, La Bagarre dans la Discothèque, un jeu musical complétement décalé où la créativité et la mauvaise foi font loi. À partir de midi, avec une belle bande de chroniqueurs, ils explorent ensemble tous les pans de la culture belge et internationale sans sacralisation, pour découvrir avec simplicité, passion et humour. Merci pour votre écoute Entrez sans Frapper c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 11h30 à 13h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes de Entrez sans Frapper sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/8521 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Andy Warholi tiro egin zion emakumearen bizitza ezagutu dugu Juan Aldaz soziologoaren eskutik: Valerie Solanas. Gizon guztiak akabatu egin behar zirela aldarrikatu zuen haurtzaro gogorra, sexu abusuak eta gaixotasun mentalak jasandako emakume hark ...

Il y a (au moins) trois bonnes raisons d'inviter Ovidie. 1, parce que captivant est son documentaire sur Valerie Solanas, ultra féministe ultra radicale (Solanas tira sur Warhol, et publia Scum Manifesto – SCUM pour Society for Cutting Up Men, l'association pour tailler les hommes en pièces).

Well, this could be awkward: when we last featured a story on the podcast a year ago, it also focused on parasocial relationships and included masturbation! This time around, we are again in deft hands. Marie Manilla's short story “Watchers”, set in 1968 Pittsburgh with both the steel mills and Andy Warhol as vital elements, is replete with narrative and thematic echoes that satisfy and leave us wanting more at the same time. Tune in for this lively discussion which touches on budding creative and identity-based aspirations, celebrity, performance art, pain in public and private, and much more. Give it a listen -- you know you want to! (Remember you can read or listen to the full story first, as there are spoilers! Just scroll down the page for the episode on our website.)   (We also welcome editor Lisa Zerkle to the table for her first show!) At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest   Listen to the story Watchers in its entirety (separate from podcast reading)   Parasocial relationships https://mashable.com/article/parasocial-relationships-definition-meaning   Andy Warhol's childhood home in Pittsburgh (the setting of this story) http://www.warhola.com/warholahouse.html   “History” article about Andy Warhol's shooting by Valerie Solanas https://www.history.com/news/andy-warhol-shot-valerie-solanas-the-factory    I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996 film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Shot_Andy_Warhol      ** Fun Fact 1: the original poster for the 1996 film hangs in Jason's apartment.   ** Fun Fact 2: the actor who portrayed Valerie Solanas in “I Shot Andy Warhol”, Lili Taylor, is married to three-time PBQ-published author Nick Flynn.   Nick Flynn's author page on PBQ http://pbqmag.org/tag/nick-flynn/   Dangerous Art: The Weapons of Performance Artist Chris Burden https://www.theartstory.org/blog/dangerous-art-the-weapons-of-performance-artist-chris-burden/ In her fiction and essays, West Virginia writer Marie Manilla delights in presenting fuller, perhaps unexpected, portraits of Appalachians, especially those who live in urban areas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Marie's books include The Patron Saint of Ugly, Shrapnel, and Still Life with Plums: Short Stories. She lives in Huntington, her hometown, with her Pittsburgh-born husband, Don.   Instagram and Facebook: @MarieManilla, Author website    Watchers        Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn't used to afternoon drinking. They can't hear Zany over the Krebbs' crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany's little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.        The fingertips on Zany's bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.        There's nothing wrong with Zany's arm, but that isn't the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she's up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I'll take you across my knee. I don't care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.        Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom's salvaged lamps. “Why don't you do that in your room?”  Dad didn't like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones.  She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn't the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?        Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It's hard to budge through Mom's junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don't own a cat.  Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.        “You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.        Zany hates Mom's manly haircut and has said so. “It's Gig's turn!”        Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany's attic where Mom's hoard had been disallowed, but it's begun trickling up. “No, it's not!” Gig's transistor blares louder.        “Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”        Mom can't stand looking at the neighbor's wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she'll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won't be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol's mother did for chump change.        Zany's legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she's running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It's a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.”       A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom's, and Vi wears an apron and dime store lipstick while she does it. Fresh peas instead of canned. Real mashed potatoes instead of instant. Vi is a better housekeeper, too, organizing Mom's trash into four-foot piles that line the walls. Every day Mom trolls back alleys and neighbors' garbage in dingy clothes that make her look like a hobo. That's what the kids say:  Your mom looks like a hobo. She pulls a rickety cart and loads it with moldy linens, rolled-up rugs, dented wastebaskets. Zany wonders if Dad regrets marrying the wrong sister. She knows he regrets not having a son, a boy who could have been Lester if Dad had a different heart. Instead, Dad got Lester on at the blast furnace, because “No one sleeps under my roof for free.” Who needs a high school diploma?        In the kitchen, Aunt Vi lets out one of her sobs. She only does that in private after Mom's third scolding: “He's dead, Vi. Crying won't bring him back.”        Zany misses Uncle Mo, too. His pocketful of peppermints. The trick coin he always plucked from Zany's ear. The last time Zany's family visited, she walked through their decrepit Franklin Arms apartment with its spongy floors and clanking pipes, but no maze of debris to negotiate. No cat piss smell or sister blaring the radio. She found Lester in his room at a child's desk he'd outgrown, doughy boy that he then was, doing homework without being nagged.  Astounding. His room was spartan, plenty of space for a second bed if Zany asked Aunt Vi sweetly enough. But no. Zany couldn't abandon Andy in his Dawson Street sickbed. Lester's only wall decoration was a world map strung with red yarn radiating from Pittsburgh to France, China, the South Pole. She wanted to ask why those destinations, but didn't, entranced as she was by all that fresh-aired openness, plus his feverishly scribbling hand.       Now, Aunt Vi leans in the dining room dabbing her face with a dishtowel. She's aged a decade since moving here and it isn't all due to grief. She targets Zany on the floor. “Everything all right in here?”        Zany has stopped breathing. Her eyes are glazed and her tongue lolls from her mouth.  She's getting better at playing dead.        “All right then.” Aunt Vi is getting better at not reacting. The screen door slams behind her.        Zany pulls in her tongue and inhales. She starts counting bricks again until Aunt Vi calls: “There they are!” as she does every workday.        Zany pictures Dad and Lester padding up Dawson. Wet hair slicked back because they shower off the stench before coming home. Zany appreciates that. Their boots scrape the steps to the porch where Aunt Vi will take their lunchpails. And there she is coming through the door and dashing to rinse their thermoses at the kitchen sink. Mom will stay put and pour Dad a finger of scotch.        Lester bangs inside and pauses in the dining room entryway. He's leaner now on account of the physical labor. Taller too. He eyes Zany's bandaged arm, not with Aunt Vi's alarm, but with the kind of baffled wonder Zany has always been after. Their eyes meet and it's the same look he gave her the day she walked backward all the way to the Eliza Number Two—not  because Dad and Lester worked there, but because it was lunchtime, and a gaggle of men would  be eating beneath that pin oak by the furnace entrance. And there they were, her father among them, not easy to see having to crane her neck as Zany picked her way over the railroad tracks.        “What the hell is she doing?” said Tom Folsom. Zany recognized her neighbor's voice.  “She's off her nut,” said another worker.       Zany twisted fully around to see if her father would defend her, but he was already hustling back to the furnace.        “Something's not right with that girl,” said Folsom.        “Nothing wrong with her,” said Lester from beneath a different tree where he ate his cheese sandwich alone.        Folsom spit in the grass. “Shut up, fairy boy.”        Lester wasn't a fairy boy, Zany knew.        Today, leaning in the dining room, Lester looks as if he can see inside Zany's skull to the conjured Factory room she and Andy will one day share: walls scrubbed clean and painted white.  Her drawings or paintings lining the walls in tidy rows. Maybe sculptures aligned on shelves. Or mobiles overhead spinning in the breeze. Lester nods at her fantasy as if it's a good one. He has his own escapism. Zany knows that too, and she looks away first so her eyes won't let him know that she knows.        Lester heads to the cellar where he spends most of his time. Mom partitioned off the back corner for him with clothesline and a bed sheet. Installed an army cot and gooseneck lamp on a crate. Andy Warhol holed up in the cellar when he was a kid developing film in a jerry-rigged darkroom. Zany constructed one from an oversized cardboard box she wedged into that shadowy space beneath the stairs. She cut a closable door in the box and regularly folds herself inside to catalogue her achievements in a notebook. Stood barefoot on a hot tar patch on Frazier Street for seventy-two seconds. Mr. Braddock called me a dolt, but I said: You're the dolt!        From below, the sound of Lester falling onto his cot followed by a sigh so deep Zany's lungs exhale, too. Whatever dreams he had got buried under apartment rubble along with Uncle Mo.       Outside, Dad has taken Aunt Vi's creaky rocker. “He's a strange one,” he says about Lester. “What's he up to down there?”        Mom says, “Who the hell knows?”        Zany clamps her unbandaged hand over her mouth to keep that knowledge from spilling.  She saw what he was up to the day she was tucked in her box and forgot time until footsteps pounded the stairs above her. She peeked through the peephole she'd punched into her cardboard door as Lester peeled off his shirt, his pants. He left on his boxers and socks. Didn't bother to draw his sheet curtain, just plopped on the cot and lit a cigarette. His smoking still surprised her. The boy he once was was also buried under rubble. Zany regretted not making her presence known, but then it was too late with Lester in his underwear, and all. Plus, she was captivated by his fingers pulling the cigarette to his lips. The little smoke rings he sent up to the floor joists. She wondered if he was dreaming of China or the South Pole, or just sitting quietly at his too-small desk back in his apartment inhaling all that fresh air. Finally, he snubbed out the cigarette in an empty tuna can. Zany hoped he would roll over for sleep, but he slid a much-abused magazine from beneath his pillow and turned pages. Even in the scant light Zany made out the naked lady on the cover. Zany's heart thudded, even more so when Lester's hand slipped beneath his waistband and started moving up and down, up and down. She told her eyes to close but they wouldn't, both entranced and nauseated by what she shouldn't be seeing. She knew what he was up to, having done her own exploring when she had her own room. She'd conjure Andy Warhol's face and mouth and delicate hands—because those rumors weren't true. They just weren't. Harder to explore in the bed she now shared with Gig. Stupid Aunt Vi, and stupid collapsed Franklin Arms.       What Lester was up to looked angry. Violent, even. A jittery burn galloped beneath Zany's skin and she bit her lip, drawing blood. But she couldn't look away from Lester's furious hand, his eyes ogling that magazine until they squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a grimace that did not look like joy. The magazine collapsed onto his chest and his belly shuddered. Only then did Zany close her eyes as the burn leaked through her skin. When Lester's snores came, she tiptoed upstairs to collapse on Andy's echo. She caught Lester seven more times, if caught is the right word, lying in wait as she was, hoping to see, hoping not to.  “You better be setting the table!” Mom yells now from the porch.        Zany grunts and makes her way to the kitchen where Aunt Vi pulls a roast from the oven.  Zany heaves a stack of plates to the dining room and deals them out like playing cards.  “Don't break my dishes!” Mom calls. I hate your hair, Zany wants to say.  There is a crash, but it's not dishes. It comes from overhead where Gig screams.  Thumping on the stairs as she thunders down, transistor in hand. “Zany!”  Gig rushes into the dining room, ponytail swaying, eyes landing on her sister. “He's been shot!”        Zany's mind hurtles back two months to when Martin Luther King was killed. Riots erupted in Pittsburgh's Black neighborhoods: The Hill District and Homewood and Manchester.  “Who?” Zany says, conjuring possibilities: LBJ, Sidney Portier. But to Zany, it's much worse.        “Andy Warhol!”        Zany counts this as the meanest lie Gig's ever told. “He was not.”        “Yes, he was!” Gig turns up the radio and the announcer confirms it: a crazed woman shot Warhol in his Factory.       Aunt Vi comes at Zany with her arms wide, because she understands loss. “Oh, honey.”  Zany bats her hands away. “It's not true.”        Vi backs into Mom's hoard. “Is he dead?”        Gig says: “They don't know.”        Zany can't stomach the smug look on Gig's face, as if she holds Andy's life or death between her teeth. Zany wants to slap that look off, so she does.        Gig screams.        “What the hell's going on in there?” Mom calls.        “Zany hit me!” Gig says at the very moment Aunt Vi says: “Andy Warhol's been shot!”  “No he wasn't!” Zany says again, wanting to slap them both.        Mom and Dad hustle inside where Gig cups her reddening cheek and bawls louder.  “It's nothing,” Mom says at the sight of her sniveling daughter, but Dad enfolds Gig in his arms. “There, there.”        “Don't coddle that child,” says Mom, and for once Zany agrees.        “Now, Mae.” Dad cups the back of Gig's head and there's a different look on her face.  Triumph, maybe.        Pounding on the shared duplex wall, Evie Krebbs, who never could shush that wailing baby. “Andy Warhol's been shot!” she calls to them. “Did you all hear?”        “We heard,” Mom answers as the baby cries louder, and so does Gig, who won't be upstaged. Mom says: “That's the price of fame I guess.”        “Being shot?” says Aunt Vi.        “Put yourself in the public eye and anything's liable to happen. Lotta kooks in this world.”       The neighbor kids' chant sounds in Zany's head: Your mother's a hobo.        “I'd rather be shot than a hobo,” says Zany.        Mom's head snaps back. “What the hell's that supposed to mean?”        Zany doesn't fully know what she means, or maybe she does.        Dad says, “Turn up the radio and see if he's dead.”        Zany doesn't want to know the answer, and to keep him alive she runs to the basement where Andy will always be a sickly boy developing film. Never mind Lester in his bed sending smoke rings up to the floor joists. Never mind her family still jabbering overhead.       Zany dashes to her cardboard box and closes the door, her body shaking, but not from any disease. Andy can't be dead. He just can't, because if he is Zany will never make it to New York. Will never pound on his Factory door. She will never be famous enough for someone to shoot.        She doesn't know she's sobbing until Lester's voice drifts over. “Zany?”        It's hard to speak with that hand gripping her throat and her father overhead still babbling: “Turn it up, Gig.” All Zany eeks out is a sob.        Lester's skinny voice slips through that slit in her door. “Zany?”        The grip loosens and Zany puts her eye to the peephole.        There he is, Lester, on his narrow cot in the windowless cellar where he now lives. He slides his hand into his waistband and he tilts his head toward her. “Are you watching?”  Zany's breathing settles, and the overhead voices disappear taking with them the possibility of Andy's death. Her eyes widens so she can take it all in, the violent strokes, his contorting face, because she won't look away from Lester's pain, or hers.  Finally, she answers him: “Yes.” 

he authoritative biography of the 60s countercultural icon who wrote SCUM Manifesto, shot Andy Warhol, and made an unforgettable mark on feminist history.Too drastic, too crazy, too "out there," too early, too late, too damaged, too much—Valerie Solanas has been dismissed but never forgotten. She has become, unwittingly, a figurehead for women's unexpressed rage, and stands at the center of many worlds. She inhabited Andy Warhol's Factory scene, circulated among feminists and the countercultural underground, charged men money for conversation, despised "daddy's girls," and outlined a vision for radical gender dystopia.Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the polemical diatribe SCUM Manifesto, Solanas is one of the most famous women of her era. SCUM Manifesto—which predicted ATMs, test-tube babies, the Internet, and artificial insemination long before they existed—has sold more copies, and has been translated into more languages, than nearly all other feminist texts of its time.Shockingly little work has interrogated Solanas's life. This book is the first biography about Solanas, including original interviews with family, friends (and enemies), and numerous living Warhol associates. It reveals surprising details about her life: the children nearly no one knew she had, her drive for control over her own writing and copyright, and her elusive personal and professional relationships.Valerie Solanas reveals the tragic, remarkable life of an iconic figure. It is “not only a remarkable biographical feat but also a delicate navigation of an unwieldy, demanding, and complex life story” (BOMB Magazine).Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

Ben Morea, Black Mask, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, the STP Family, STP, LSD, anarchism, 1960s counterculture, Affinity Groups, the Living Theater, Julian Beck, Judith Malina, Mary Pinochet Meyer, Timothy Leary, Kennedy White House, Ford Foundation. Ram Das/Richard Alpert, Woodstock, Abbie Hoffman, Chicago 7, Yippies, Situationist International, Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Andy Warhol, The Factory, Ray Johnson, Valerie Solanas, Allan Van Newkirk, Olympic Press, High Times, Dick Motherfucker, Richard Lynch, Tierra Amarilla, Reies Tijerina, Dan Georgakas, Andrei Codrescu, Jim Dunnigan, Marion Zimmer Bradley, CIA, Black Panthers, White Panthers, Patty HearstMusic by: Keith Allen Dennishttps://keithallendennis.bandcamp.com/Additional Music by: ilsahttps://ilsa.bandcamp.com/album/preyer Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Den romantiska kärleken ses som central för att finna lycka och mening i livet - men vad är kärlek egentligen? Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. Även om det pratas om kärlek hela tiden och överallt så är det inte helt lätt att definiera romantisk kärlek. Vissa menar att kärleken kommer utifrån, som en naturkraft med styrkan att förändra allt. Andra menar att det kommer inifrån, som en eld som tänds av den vi älskar. Så vad är egentligen kärlek? Hur vet man att man är kär? Vad är kärlek när förälskelsen har svalnat? Och är kärleken alltid något bra?Medverkande: Emma Engdahl, professor i sociologi vid Göteborgs universitet och Fredrik Svenaeus, professor i filosofi vid Centrum för praktisk kunskap, Södertörns Högskola.Programledare: Cecilia Strömberg WallinProducent: David RuneVeckans tips: Böcker: SCUM Manifest (Society for Cutting Up Men) av Valerie Solanas, Att älska: om kärlekens natur av Lone Frank. Dokumentär: P1 Dokumentär: Klimataktivisterna som stoppar flygplan av Simon Folger.

Not only are we off the plot today, we aren't really gardening either. In this special edition of Digging, Flo is spending time with Penny Rimbaud in his garden. Penny is a founding member of the anarcho-punk band Crass and performance group EXIT, as well as a poet, writer and philosopher. In this episode Penny gives Flo a tour of the garden and ‘sheds' at Dial House, the radical open house he established in the 1960s. They discuss his approach to meditation and philosophy as well as Penny's various tattoos. They talk about the formative power of Paul Rep's book on Zen, the early influence of the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and the fact that Valerie Solanas's Scum Manifesto was the book most often stolen by Dial House guests. Featured track - The Casimir Connection - Forgiveness from the as yet unreleased Caliban Sounds album 'REFLECTION'. Credit to Dianne McLoughlin/soprano sax. Alcyona Mick/piano. Kit Massey/violin. Tim Fairhall/bass. Written and arranged by Diane McLoughlin. Produced by Dianne McLoughlin and Penny Rimbaud.Presenter & editor - Flo Dill, Producer - Lizzy King, Sound Recording - Giulia Campanella, Audio production - Felix Stock. Music - Cleaners from Venus - The Artichoke That Loved Me, courtesy of Martin Newell & Captured Tracks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females, an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas, was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents. Recorded September 26, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University Edited by Michele Moses Music by Dani Lencioni Art by Leanne Shapton Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Abrimos el expediente de Valerie Solanas, la autora del manifiesto SCUM que intentó asesinar a Andy Warhol disparándole hasta en tres ocasiones. No lo consiguió‘La Noche de Adolfo Arjona' es un programa de la Cadena COPE que te acompaña en la madrugada del domingo al lunes de 01.30 a 04.00 horas, con Adolfo Arjona a la cabeza y todo su equipo de profesionales. El comunicador, Premio Nacional de Radio 2021, se pone un año más al frente de los micrófonos de COPE para consolidarse como referencia en la radio de madrugada.El programa arranca cada lunes con 'Los Especiales de La Noche de Arjona', sello indiscutible del programa liderado por el periodista andaluz, que ha recibido diversos galardones a lo largo de su dilatada trayectoria, como el Premio Andalucía de Periodismo 2020 en la categoría de radio o la Antena de Plata en 2009. En esta sección, desde el arranque del programa a la 1:30 hasta las 4:00 horas de la madrugada, se abordan temáticas muy variadas que van desde la música al cine, pasando por el misterio, la ciencia o la historia. Todo un sinfín de temas con los que intentamos sorprender cada semana a nuestra audiencia.A partir de las 3.00 horas comienza 'El porqué de las cosas', una sección dedicada a las personas curiosas en la que ofrecemos respuestas -de la mano de...

Fiction writer and editor A.A. de Levine joins to discuss Mary Harron's debut feature, 'I Shot Andy Warhol', featuring a seismic performace from Lili Taylor as the infamous feminist writer Valerie Solanas as well as Jared Harris as the late pop artist, and a moving turn from Stephen Dorff as trans icon Candy Darling. The film is a fascinating, frightening view into the life and experiences of Solanas that led her to an increased state of anger, paranoia, and aggression which eventually resulted in the film's titular act of violence. We take a look at the real life Solanas and her most enduring work, The SCUM Manifesto; its aims, its limitations, and its intentions as a furious feminist screed, a work of biting satire, or something in the middle. Then, we discuss the film's portrayal of New York's art scene in the 1960s and its nuanced examination of the ways Warhol and his Factory cohort offer a contradiction of the avant-garde as filtered through highly palatable standards of beauty and taste. Finally, we talk about the career of Mary Harron, who would go on to achieve her greatest acclaim with her sophomore feature, the teriffic 'American Psycho', before having her films relegated to a place of relative obscurity for the next two decades. Follow A.A. de Levine on Twitter.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish. 

HI!!! WERE BACK! Summer break is going well thanks for asking. Here is your August episode, and we will be back in a month to be back on track!! - Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, radical feminist, and attempted murderer. Valerie was working on getting her play produced when she approached Andy to read the scrips. He promised to read it, not to produce it. So, when Valerie asked Andy about it he said he misplaced the script. But Valerie thought he was hiding it... - Intro by the amazing Rux Ton - Logo by Sloane of The Sophisticated Crayon - SOURCES: https://medium.com/@TrueCrimeEnthusiastt/valerie-solanas-radical-feminist-who-shot-andy-warhol-cc040433bc44    https://www.distractify.com/p/why-did-valerie-solanas-shoot-andy-warhol    https://time.com/3901488/andy-warhol-valerie-solanas/    https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/valerie-solanas-radical-feminist-killed-andy-warhol/    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/obituaries/valerie-solanas-overlooked.html    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Solanas    https://www.history.com/news/andy-warhol-shot-valerie-solanas-the-factory   https://www.villagevoice.com/2000/01/11/solanas-lost-and-found/

In the new biopic, Dalíland, acclaimed director Mary Harron give us a glimpse into the Salvador Dalí's later years in 70s New York City via the immense talents of Academy Award-winner, Sir Ben Kingsley. From her look at attempted assassin Valerie Solanas in I Shot Andy Warhol to the murderous broker Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, Harron has always been attracted to infamous, challenging, and to put it lightly, difficult people.  The film is now on demand now wherever you watch movies. On our special summer episode we chat with Harron about Dalíland and much more.

Before she was directing movies about iconic figures (becoming something of an icon herself in the process) Mary Harron was a journalist. And before that, she was inspired by characters like Rosalind Russell's Hildy Johnson in HIS GIRL FRIDAY -- a woman who is valued for her incomparable skill and undeniable smarts, who can't quite seem to leave her complicated profession behind for what society deems a more "respectable" life.  Mary's new movie is DALíLAND, in theaters and on demand now.Then Jordan's got one quick thing about the trailer for the new Luca Guadagnino movie, CHALLENGERS.***With Jordan Crucchiola and Mary Harron

Encuentra este y otros artículos en http://revistalengua.comBrillante en sus estudios de psicología y mordaz en su activismo y escritura feminista, Valeria Solanas fue mucho más que la casi asesina del rey del arte pop. Los abusos sexuales que sufrió durante su infancia, así como una adolescencia marcada por la experiencia de la prostitución, la llevaron a defender la aniquilación del sexo masculino como el único remedio con el que podían contar las mujeres. Pero Solanas no disparó a Warhol (solo) por ser hombre, sino por haber extraviado —según él mismo le comentó— su manuscrito de «Up Your Ass» (que se podría traducir como «que te follen por el culo»), una obra de teatro firmada por Solanas que Warhol se habría comprometido a producir. Con todo, aquellos disparos fueron más letales para quien empuñaba el arma que para su objetivo directo, quien ni siquiera interpuso una denuncia. Sumida de nuevo en el oscuro mundo de las drogas, la mujer terminó sus días en un asilo benéfico. En las siguientes líneas, recogidas en el libro «Warhol. La vida como arte» (Taurus), el crítico de arte Blake Gopnik narra el que pudo haber sido el último día de vida del artista.Narrado por Antonio Martínez AsensioImagen ilustrativa: Portada del Daily News del 4 de junio de 1968 en la que se informa del intento de asesinato de Warhol. En la imagen de la izquierda se ve al comisario de arte Mario Amaya con la camisa cubierta de sangre. Crédito: Getty Images. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast was recorded about a week before its subject, Andrea Long Chu, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, so it doesn't come up in the conversation with Blake Smith, but it's interesting to keep in mind as he and I analyze Chu and try to understand the particular role she plays in the broader intellectual and journalistic ecosystem.Our story begins in early 2018, when the hipster intellectual magazine N+1 published a long essay titled “On Liking Women.” The essay, which went rather viral, was about the author's transition to being a woman, her fascination with the 1967 radical tract the SCUM Manifesto, the dynamics of sissy porn, and her complicated feelings about wanting to be a woman, wanting women, and the universal fear of being feminized.Its author, Andrea Long Chu, was at the time a doctoral student in comparative literature at NYU, and in all respects unfamous. The essay would change that, rather dramatically. In the way that Ta-Nehisi Coates was, for a time, the black intellectual, and Wesley Yang was the Asian intellectual, Chu became, and perhaps remains, the trans intellectual of the moment. Later that year she wrote another splashy piece,“My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy,” for the New York Times. Her 2019 book, Females, got an immense amount of attention. In 2021 she was hired as a staff critic for New York magazine, and in that role has written a series of buzzed about reviews. She's not famous, exactly, but she's almost as close to it as journalists get it. She is now friends, for instance, with the genuinely famous Emily Ratajkowski, whom she profiled in The New York Times Magazine, and who later interviewed Chu for her own podcast, High Low with Emrata.As she says to Ratajkowski, some of this success was a matter of timing. There was a space waiting to be filled. Trans issues had gotten big in the culture, and while there were a lot of good trans memoirs out there, and an increasing number of trans people making a name for themselves in the “influencer” space, there was neither an intellectual nor a magazine feature writer who had yet made a name for him or herself reliably and stylishly explaining the trans thing to the world. Chu has been able to step into this space so successfully because she is a stylish writer, because she has a command of the relevant theory, and also because she has that thing that so many it boys and girls of journalism have had: she's a tease. She comes close and dances away. She reveals and withholds, issues grand pronouncements, and then implies that she's just kidding … maybe.Here she is at the end of her breakout essay, I am being tendentious, dear reader, because I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period. This is most emphatically not something trans women are supposed to want. The grammar of contemporary trans activism does not brook the subjunctive. Trans women are women, we are chided with silky condescension, as if we have all confused ourselves with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as if we were all simply trapped in the wrong politics, as if the cure for dysphoria were wokeness. How can you want to be something you already are? Desire implies deficiency; want implies want. To admit that what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire is to admit just how much of transition takes place in the waiting rooms of wanting things, to admit that your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back.…This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love.I've been reading and listening to Chu recently, and I find myself atypically confused. I honestly don't know what she's trying to say, about gender and sexuality and sex and politics, nor whether she actually believes whatever it is she's trying to say. I don't know if she's the real deal or, like so many it boys and girls of the past, she's performing a role that is ultimately too disconnected from a genuinely grounded self to write things that are meaningful.To help me process my confusion, I reached out to Blake Smith, who recently wrote a highly critical piece on Chu. Officially, Blake is an historian of modern France coming off a Fulbright in North Macedonia, and before that a PhD from Northwestern University. Unofficially, but more relevantly for our purposes, he's been writing up a storm of intellectual but accessible essays over the past few years, for a variety of publications, most often Tablet, where the Chu piece was published. These fall into a few different buckets. One is what I'd call his ongoing project to identify potential intellectual and creative resources for the revivification of liberalism. This has manifested in critical essays on various eminent and obscure European and American intellectuals, including folks like Michel Foucault, Philip Rieff, Judith Shklar, Leo Strauss, Jacob Taubes, Richard Howard, and Roland Barthes. Another bucket is criticism of woke thinking and writing, and a third is his interest in queer theory. His Chu piece falls into both of the latter buckets, although Chu has a complicated relationship to woke. It may overlap with the first too, though that's not as obvious a connection.His Chu piece begins not with Chu herself, but with the archetypal conversion (or transition) story of western civilization, that of Saul of Tarsus, who had a vision of Jesus while on the road to Damascus. He abandoned his Judaism, changed his name to Paul, and dedicated his life to evangelizing for the new faith. Or, in Smith's tart description, he just changed his stripes, remaining “what he had been before—an antagonizing, persecutory self-promoter,” but with a new lexicon of values and a new set of targets. Smith writes:In his letters to churches throughout the Roman Empire, Paul gave an account of himself as being uniquely guilty and abject—the “chief of sinners”—and especially favored by God. In doing so, he created a powerful and enduring model for the way people seek attention and influence in Western culture, from the Confessions of Augustine to the ubiquitous self-narrations of our own moment. Flamboyant rejection of a former life, a lurid picture of its depravity and danger, the wrenching rapture of being overtaken and undone by an outward power, a new self to be declared and recognized by others, new enemies (shadows of the old self) to be exposed and attacked, and a continual staggering back and forth between declarations of one's utter unworthiness and ethical exaltation.One of the most successful contemporary practitioners of this mode of confession, in which a conversion is narrated in a mode of self-abasement and self-aggrandizement, is the essayist Andrea Long Chu. In 2018, Chu, who transitioned from male to female, established her reputation with essays for N+1 and The New York Times on her desire for femininity and her feelings about her new vagina. “Few of us” trans women, she argued, “dare to talk about” the truths she purportedly exposed in these essays—that transition is motivated by fetishistic investment in the most external, sexualized aspects of traditional femininity (“Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts”)—and that transitioning had made her more dysphoric and “suicidal.”Chu positioned herself in national publications as declaring hidden truths that other people like herself had been too cowardly to avow. Publications from The Point to The Nation to Vogue interviewed her, and New York magazine has more recently hired her, while scholars devote articles and even special issues of journals to her contributions to gender theory. The most notorious of the latter was her 2019 pamphlet-length book, Females, published with Verso, a press that once had something to do with the left. In Females, Chu worked on two different double registers. She played at once comic and serious, giving herself the right to backtrack her most radical claims as ironic “bits.” She gave, moreover, a reading of Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto (1967) as a statement about the nature of desire as such, for everyone, and as a kind of prefiguring of her own transition. It was as if Chu became the protagonist of Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, who is convinced that a local writer's autobiographical poem is in fact the elaborately allegorized story of his own life. Where Solanas had called for the extermination of men, she took her plan only as far as a failed attempt to murder Andy Warhol. Females ends with Solanas, at a distance of half-a-century, killing another “Andy”—Chu's former, male self. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Valerie Solanas scheiterte 1968 mit ihrem Versuch, den Künstler Andy Warhol zu erschießen. In der Folge entwickelte sich Warhol zu einem erfolgreichen Künstler. Ihren eigenen Anliegen, auf die sie aufmerksam machen wollte, nützte die Tat nichts.

Am 26.4.1988, heute vor 25 Jahren, wurde Valerie Solanas tot aufgefunden. Bis heute bekannt ist Solanas vor allem als die Frau, die auf den weltberühmten Pop-Art-Künstler Andy Warhol schoss. Ihre Wut über die Unterdrückung von Frauen hat sie im "SCUM-Manifesto" ausgedrückt. Autor: Thomas Mau Von Thomas Mau.

When Valerie Solanas moved to New York in the early-to-mid 1960s, she wanted nothing more than to become a writer. Within a few years, she approached perhaps the most admired—and reviled—artist in the United States, Andy Warhol, proposing that he produce her pipe-bomb of a comedy, Up Your Ass. Though promising at first, their relationship went south, and in 1968, Solanas walked into Warhol's studio with the intention of shooting him dead. As you can probably tell from this summary alone, this episode contains language that may offend some listeners.   Show notes and full transcripts available at www.artofcrimepodcast.com.   If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/artofcrimepodcast.   The Art of Crime is part of the Airwave Media network. To learn more about Airwave, visit www.airwavemedia.com. If you'd like to advertise on The Art of Crime, please email advertising@airwavemedia.com.

What would you do to get your work published? In the 1960s, Valerie Solanas was willing to kill for it.View this week's show notes.

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

The authoritative biography of the 60s countercultural icon who wrote SCUM Manifesto, shot Andy Warhol, and made an unforgettable mark on feminist history. Valerie Solanas is one of the most polarizing figures of 1960s counterculture. A cult hero to some and vehemently denounced by others, she has been dismissed but never forgotten. Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the infamous SCUM Manifesto, Solanas became one of the most famous women of her era. But she was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent much of her life homeless or in mental hospitals. Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, a sui generis vision of radical gender dystopia, predicted ATMs, test-tube babies, the Internet, and artificial insemination long before they existed. It has sold more copies and been translated into more languages than nearly all other feminist texts of its time. And yet, shockingly little work has investigated the life of its author. This book is the first biography about Solanas, including original interviews with family, friends (and enemies), and numerous living Warhol associates. It reveals surprising details about Solanas's life: the children nearly no one knew she had, her drive for control over her own writing, and her elusive personal and professional relationships. Valerie Solanas reveals the tragic, remarkable life of an iconic figure. It is “not only a remarkable biographical feat but also a delicate navigation of an unwieldy, demanding, and complex life story” (BOMB Magazine).

The authoritative biography of the 60s countercultural icon who wrote SCUM Manifesto, shot Andy Warhol, and made an unforgettable mark on feminist history. Valerie Solanas is one of the most polarizing figures of 1960s counterculture. A cult hero to some and vehemently denounced by others, she has been dismissed but never forgotten. Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the infamous SCUM Manifesto, Solanas became one of the most famous women of her era. But she was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent much of her life homeless or in mental hospitals. Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, a sui generis vision of radical gender dystopia, predicted ATMs, test-tube babies, the Internet, and artificial insemination long before they existed. It has sold more copies and been translated into more languages than nearly all other feminist texts of its time. And yet, shockingly little work has investigated the life of its author. This book is the first biography about Solanas, including original interviews with family, friends (and enemies), and numerous living Warhol associates. It reveals surprising details about Solanas's life: the children nearly no one knew she had, her drive for control over her own writing, and her elusive personal and professional relationships. Valerie Solanas reveals the tragic, remarkable life of an iconic figure. It is “not only a remarkable biographical feat but also a delicate navigation of an unwieldy, demanding, and complex life story” (BOMB Magazine).

This week we watched a German film called We Are the Night from 2010. It was German. The most German 2010 film ever. Also KC got an incredible new drone job and SM lives on having popsicles and not having covid!We learnedGerman Rape Murder Houses are a thing?!  Eyeballs tell you if you're a vampire   You can kick a hot man in the dick to see if he's in love with you  Follow us on the gram: https://www.instagram.com/bloodsuckerspod/Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/littlerenegadefilmsTHANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!We Are the Night (German: Wir sind die Nacht) is a 2010 German vampire horror film directed by Dennis Gansel, starring Karoline Herfurth and Nina Hoss. The film deals with a young woman who gets bitten by a female vampire and drawn into her world. She falls in love with a young police officer who investigates a murder case involving the vampires. The film explores themes of depression, self-harm, the consequences of immortality, suicide, and explores Valerie Solanas' idea of an all-female society.Support the show

New Guest Expert! On this week's Aftermath, Rebecca speaks with Dr. Phyllis Chesler about the women's movement of the 60's & 70's and how the writings of Valerie Solanas and her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol fit into the legacy of the American feminist movement. Dr. Phyllis is a pioneer of Second Wave Feminism and a best-selling author of over 20 books, including the landmark feminist class Women and Madness. Afterward, Producer Clayton Early stops by to debrief and revisit the verdict with Rebecca.We have merch!Join our Discord!Tell us who you think is to blame at http://thealarmistpodcast.comEmail us at thealarmistpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Instagram @thealarmistpodcastFollow us on Twitter @alarmistThe Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/alarmist. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Who's to blame for the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol?This week, The Alarmist (Rebecca Delgado Smith) speaks with fellow podcaster Anna Stoecklein Lau about Valerie Solanas and her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol. Host of the podcast The Story of Woman, Anna is the perfect guest to help explore the broader context of this incident. They're joined by Fact Checker Chris Smith and Producer Clayton Early. Valerie Solanas: villain or victim of the times? Up on the board: Mental Health Stigma, Artistic Injustice, Hypocrisy & Gender.We have merch!Join our Discord!Tell us who you think is to blame at http://thealarmistpodcast.comEmail us at thealarmistpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Instagram @thealarmistpodcastFollow us on Twitter @alarmistThe Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/alarmist. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

To be a modern Australian is to be bombarded with arguments from all sides. The newspapers exist to shout at you from their front pages, your 'friends' always want you to take a position on something, social media demands that you be brave and stand up for whatever's currently popular. Our solution? Look to the greatest thinkers to put all these disagreements to rest! We've read some interesting perspectives for this podcast. Varg Vikernes, Terence McKenna, Julius Evola, Valerie Solanas; why not look to these masters for answers? So that's exactly what we do.We drew up a list of contentious topics and argue about them, from the perspectives of those whose works we have read for Bookclub from Hell.

The 12-story Women's House of Detention, situated in the heart of Greenwich Village in New York City, from 1932 to 1974, was central to the queer history of The Village. The House of D, as it was known, housed such inmates as Angela Davis, Afeni Shakur, Andrea Dworkin, and Valerie Solanas, and was formative in their thinking and writing. On the night of the Stonewall Riots, the incarcerated women and transmaculaine people in the House of D, a few hundred feet away from The Stonewall Inn, joined in, chanting “Gay power!” and lighting their possessions on fire and throwing them out the windows onto the street in solidarity. Joining me to help us understand more about the Women's House of Detention and its role in queer history is historian and writer Hugh Ryan, author of the 2022 book, The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. Image Credit: “Women's House of Detention, Jefferson Market Courthouse, View Northwest from West 8th Street, at Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, 1943,” Municipal Archives, Department of Public Works Collection. Additional Sources: “Prison Memoirs: The New York Women's House of Detention,” by Angela Davis,The Village Voice, Originally published October 10, 1974. “The Women's House of Detention,” by Sarah Bean Apmann, Village Preservation, January 29, 2018. “Women's House of Detention,” 1931-1974, by Joan Nestle, Out History, Historical Musings 2008. “'The Women's House of Detention' Illuminates a Horrific Prison That 'Helped Define Queerness for America',” by Gabrielle Bruney, Jezebel, May 9, 2022. “Site of the Women's House of Detention (1932-1974),” by Rebecca Woodham and Clio Admin,” Clio: Your Guide to History. February 26, 2021. “The Queer History of the Women's House of Detention,” by Hugh Ryan, The Activist History Review, May 31, 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So this episode, Jack and Levi journey into the no-boys-allowed zone to work out why men are responsible for all ills in the world, and why women today can look forward to a fully-automated, immortal, man-free future.

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Valerie Solanas wants us dead. Can't blame her.

The authoritative biography of the 60s countercultural icon who wrote SCUM Manifesto, shot Andy Warhol, and made an unforgettable mark on feminist history. Valerie Solanas is one of the most polarizing figures of 1960s counterculture. A cult hero to some and vehemently denounced by others, she has been dismissed but never forgotten. Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the infamous SCUM Manifesto, Solanas became one of the most famous women of her era. But she was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent much of her life homeless or in mental hospitals. Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, a sui generis vision of radical gender dystopia, predicted ATMs, test-tube babies, the Internet, and artificial insemination long before they existed. It has sold more copies and been translated into more languages than nearly all other feminist texts of its time. And yet, shockingly little work has investigated the life of its author. This book is the first biography about Solanas, including original interviews with family, friends (and enemies), and numerous living Warhol associates. It reveals surprising details about Solanas's life: the children nearly no one knew she had, her drive for control over her own writing, and her elusive personal and professional relationships. Valerie Solanas reveals the tragic, remarkable life of an iconic figure. It is “not only a remarkable biographical feat but also a delicate navigation of an unwieldy, demanding, and complex life story” (BOMB Magazine).

Rendez-vous le 5 novembre pour la nouvelle saison du Goût de M. Chaque semaine, une personnalité issue du monde de la culture, de la mode, du design ou de la cuisine racontera son histoire personnelle du goût. Mais aussi ses dégoûts. Comment elle s'est façonné un art de vivre, en continuité ou au contraire en rupture avec son milieu d'origine. Comment celui-ci a évolué au cours de sa vie, de ses rencontres, de ses expériences.-----Chloé Delaume est l'invitée du podcast Le Goût de M proposé par M Le magazine du Monde. L'écrivaine, qui a reçu le Prix Médicis à l'automne pour son dernier roman Le Cœur synthétique, a répondu depuis son appartement du Pré-Saint-Gervais (Seine-Saint-Denis) aux questions de la journaliste et productrice Géraldine Sarratia.Chloé Delaume évoque son enfance au Liban puis en banlieue parisienne auprès d'une mère prof de français qui lui transmet l'amour de la lecture. A 10 ans, elle est témoin du meurtre de sa mère par son père et part vivre chez son oncle et sa tante. Elle raconte alors une adolescence difficile, en souffrance, et son goût du gothique, morbide dans l'esthétique comme dans ses pulsions. La langue de Boris Vian et d'Antonin Artaud ou encore la rage du Scum Manifesto de Valerie Solanas lui font l'effet d'un choc. Elle vit un temps de la prostitution puis bascule totalement vers la littérature. « L'autofiction a alors été ma planche de salut.»Nostalgique des années 1980 et de la vague des « jeunes gens mödernes », dont elle admire l'esthétique pop et synthétique, Chloé Delaume trouve aujourd'hui à se réjouir dans l'émancipation des luttes féministes et de la sororité. « Mais je ne crois pas à l'histoire des femmes puissantes, tempère-t-elle. Je ne pense pas que ce soit un bon outil d'empowerment. » Profondément hétéro « à son grand malheur » de femme tendant à la misandrie, elle confie sa passion pour le shopping plutôt que les balades en plein air pour s'aérer la tête ; son aversion pour l'autotune (« on me fout PNL, j'ai envie d'envahir la Pologne ») et son emballement pour le premier album de Juliette Armanet. « Être une passeuse, conclut-elle, est ma véritable raison d'être. »Un podcast produit par Géraldine Sarratia (Genre idéal)Réalisation : Sulivan ClabautMusique : Gotan Project Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out.

We're talking about our favorite anti-male pump up jam, SCUM Manifesto. This controversial and iconic essay was written by Valerie Solanas, founder and singular member of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men) and failed assassin of pop art darling Andy Warhol. Werk! We dig into this manifesto, break down the perfect gay storm that lead to Andy Warhol's shooting, and celebrate the performance art of Solanas & Warhol's relationship. Could this text be contemporary if we replaced the word “men” with “patriarchy?” How much should we consider the artist's intention when reading a work? What would Valerie Solanas' twitter look like? Additional Reading: On Liking Women by Andrea Long Chu For Her by Fiona Apple The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) by Andy Warhol Extra Credit: Follow us at @wedidthereading

How strong is Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas and why didn't her film career take off more after this film? How much do you need to know about Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, Solanas, and everyone else from The Factory before watching this film? And do unlikeable protagonists still allow for great and rewatchable films? Tune in to this week's show to get these answers and more!