Glam Homecoming Prom

 

On the first of September, a Club 57 Reunion - "Glam Homecoming Prom" - at Zebulon in LA, rather than in New York, where it originally happened. This Sunday, 6pm to 9.30 pm - free admission. 

Guest of Honor Michael Des Barres participated an eon ago in the so-called "Death of Glitter" at the Palladium in Los Angeles, October 1974. A.k.a. Hollywood Street  Revival and Trash Dance. 

Homecoming Prom DJ Kristian Hoffmann, a Dolls diehard, did this saucy sketch that was used in the inner artwork of the Dolls debut.

On the Glam +  No Wave / Mutant Disco continuity - 

[from Rip It Up - US edition]

If the B-52’s had a spiritual second home in New York, it was at a place called Club 57, which was closer to a kooky arts lab than a nightclub. Indeed, the people behind Club 57--performance artists Ann Magnuson and John Sex, and painters Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring--have been described as a gang of B-52’s groupies. “We went to all [their] shows and gave the band presents,” Scharf recalled in an East Village Eye interview, adding that Keith Haring “gave them plastic fruit once and they loved it.” The sensibility that united the B-52’s and the Club 57 clique was an ironic affection for American pop culture at its most grotesquely phony or over-the-top: majorettes and cheerleading troupes, Miss America, Liberace, pajama parties,  beach movies, and the campy, misguided B-movie/Las Vegas phases of Elvis Presley’s career.

Club 57 began as a spin-off of an event called the New Wave Vaudeville, whose cast of freaks included Klaus Nomi, briefly famous for his opera-meets-Kabuki performances. Taking up residence in the basement of a Polish church at 57 St. Marks Place, the club initially showed horror B-movies such as The Blob. But soon the 57 crew started hosting elaborately designed theme parties that distilled a whole new sensibility from elements of Pop Art, drag, the trash aesthetic, and performance art. “I would create a set, a soundtrack, and a framework for people to come in and be their own characters, costume themselves,” says Ann Magnuson of theme nights such as Name That Noise: Punk Rock Game Show, Lady Wrestling: Battle to the Death, Salute to NASA (complete with simulated space flight), and Brix Deluxe Barbecue Patio Partying. “Once we started doing themes, I'd be going to thrift stores almost every day, getting costumes and props. There was also a lot of stuff on the street you could pick up, like refrigerator boxes. So we'd drag all this stuff back to the club and create, say, a Jamaican shantytown and make a putt-putt miniature golf course through it and play reggae.  It was a conceptual art piece that you could be involved in”. 

Scharf designed the Club 57 logo, a TV set with the word FUN underneath the channel control dial. ”I really saw Club 57 as an exorcism of Americana,” says Magnuson. “Because there were only three network channels of TV at that time, you watched all these old movies, and you'd pick up the sensibilities of vaudeville, the Marx Brothers, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, horror films. All that stuff informed the art.” Beneath the camp delight, though, was a semi-serious impulse to use mass culture’s tatty ephemera as a prism through which to view America’s political unconscious. As Kate Pierson from the B-52’s put it, “without being too pretentious, you can look at a K-mart Shopping Center as a modern cultural museum and learn something from what’s there and what that means.”  

Fueled by acid, mushrooms, and poppers, Club 57’s vibe was kitschadelic. It helped pave the way for the mainstreaming of camp and Mondo aesthetics that took place in the Nineties and included Deelite, Nick At Night, Mystery Science Theater 3000, the crossover success of John Waters films, and Tim Burton movies like Ed Wood and the lamentable Mars Attacks!  The Club 57 ethos was playful in both the childlike and theatrical senses of the word “play.” Artifice was celebrated and gender treated as performative rather than innate. 

[from the Aftershocks section of Shock and Awe]

A Berlin transplant to New York’s late Seventies clubland, Klaus Nomi’s own act merges Queen/Sparks-style popera, Kraftwerk’s Germanic formality, and  Zolar X’s extraterrestial image. Nomi first made a name for himself as the closing act at “New Wave Vaudeville”, a postmodern take on the variety revue staged in 1978.   Appearing onstage amid clouds of dry ice and the sounds of a landing space ship, he sang an aria from Saint-Saëns'  Samson et Dalila. Transfixed by his “transcendent, peculiar, inexplicable but undeniably otherworldly artistic vision,” a watching Kristan Hoffman of the Mumps introduces himself to Nomi. Soon Hoffman has become his music director, pulling together a backing group and developing  a set of original songs penned by himself ("Nomi Song," "Total Eclipse", “Simple Man”, “After The Fall”) and covers (Lou Christie’s “Lightning Strikes”, Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”,  Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling In Love Again”), plus baroque pieces by the likes of Purcell. 

The closest Nomi ever got to proper opera was working as an usher at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, but in the rough-edged context of New York postpunk, his pipes are astonishingly pure and celestial. “With that voice, and that eerie amorphous charisma, Klaus would be OUR Bowie,” Hoffman believes. Nomi’s adapts Bowie’s  stylized black-and-white tux + tie from the SNL performance and makes it his own signature look: a stage suit whose very wide, straight shoulders create a triangle as they taper sharply into the waist before flaring out with a  tutu-like effect.  In combination with his snow-white foundation, dark lipstick in silent-movie bow shape, and stylized black-dyed hair (huge brow, extreme widow’s peak, angular tufts sculpted like the fins on a 1950s car), the overall effect is startling: like Nomi’s been scooped out of a black-and-white 1920s science fiction movie and dropped into the garish present....  

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Here's Ann Magnuson from 2012 flying her glam freak flag high with an album in tribute to Jobriath. It's titled The Jobriath Medley: A Glam Rock Fairy Tale. Produced and arranged by Kristian Hoffman. Guest vocal from Russ Mael on "I'Maman".

anti-theatricality and rock (slight return)

Greil Marcus on Graham Parker and the Rumour's The Parkerilla, Rolling Stone, June 15 1978 

“They think it’s a show,” English rocker Graham Parker muttered one night last fall, coming off a stage in Phoenix. “But it isn’t a show, it’s real!” The Parkerilla, three sides of live material (side four is taken up by a new studio version of “Don’t Ask Me Questions,” reduced to just under four minutes for the benefit of AM radio), is a show.

We find Parker and the Rumour, who at their best greet a crowd like a storm warning, on something less than a hot night; rather, they’re very competent, which is to say that The Parkerilla is close to pointless. Parker and the Rumour don’t take off from their three previous albums, they clone them: the live version of “Don’t Ask Me Questions” offered here misses the original studio take by a mere six seconds.

The only vital differences are negative. Stephen Goulding, whose drumming on Howlin Wind and Heat Treatment is so clean and full of snap, overplays constantly; like a nightclub hack who can underline a phrase only with his cymbals, he sounds cloddish. Bob Andrews’ cute, emotionally barren piano capsizes the “Maggie May” romanticism of “Gypsy Blood.” A certain amount of bullshit has crept into Parker’s singing: he pumps up “Don’t Ask Me Questions” with melodrama, and the natural intensity of his attack sometimes crosses the line into ersatz hysteria. You can hear him pushing.

What truly makes this record a waste of time is the song selection. Parker’s last album, Stick to Me, was miserably recorded, virtually snuffing the power of the three blazing, intelligent tunes he then proceeded to rescue on-stage: “Stick to Me,” “Soul on Ice” and the magnificent “Thunder and Rain.” None is included on The Parkerilla—nor is “Pouring It All Out,” as perfect a rock & roll song as anyone has written in the Seventies, and the essence of Parker’s live dose of “reality.” What we get instead are seven and a half minutes of "The Heat in Harlem,” a cliched fantasy that only Carmen Miranda could save. And so on.

Parker’s career has clearly hit a snag, both in terms of commercial failure—FM airplay hasn’t sold his records—and in terms of his ideas of what to do about it. The enormous critical support he received for his first two albums—all of it deserved—has been pretty much transferred to Elvis Costello, who has a far more distinct (i.e., marketable and easy-to-write-about) image, and who projects the pop (as opposed to Parker’s personal) obsessiveness that critics, pop obsessives themselves, respond to most deeply. It’s not inconceivable that a nicely titled live album could put Parker across. Such artifacts have worked for other stalled performers recently: Peter Frampton, of course, but also Bob Seger, with whom Graham Parker has a lot in common. Vegas, however, is not posting any odds.

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“Laurence Olivier said, ‘What is acting but lying, and what is good lying but convincing lying?’ I don’t want to look at acting that way. Why not experiment?”  - Nicholas Cage, to New York Times. 

anti-theatricality and politics (Kamaladrama versus Fat Elvis)

"This afternoon, Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists and it was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect. The American people deserve better"

- Kamala Harris

"I'm optimistic. Was reading today about Kamala in a copy of Guardian from few days ago. In photo, striding along in suit and heels, she looked very presidential, like someone playing first female US President in some watchable TV drama. Generally, more presidential than Trump, I'd say....  And she has Air Force Two at her disposal which won't make you less presidential."

- Roy Wilkinson

Someone on J.D. Vance's  "stalking" of  Harris's plane, checking out what'll be his in a few months as the newly elected VP:

"Unserious, ridiculous performance art. They’re scrambling and can’t find an affirmative message. Trump can’t even be bothered to leave his house."

Someone on Vance's use of eyeliner:

"Central Casting recommends it to counteract his beady eyes"

An increasingly desperate J.D. Vance: 

"Kamala Harris isn’t running a presidential campaign. She’s producing a movie. Everything is scripted everywhere she goes."

But it's a movie that people want to watch, ideally in a crowded (amphi)theater- a feel-good, happy-ending one with lots of laugh lines.

Whereas... 

Will Stancil on Trump's Georgia rally:

"Everything here - the speech, the signs, the logo - has the listless vibes of an aging star doing a dull retread. The kind of unwatchable cash-in that everyone will forget happened in 18 months. Die Hard 5 vibes."

"I like hearing that actors shouldn't have political opinions from people who voted for a reality TV character."

- John Fugelsang

Trump's Sorkin-esque fanfic, as someone put it, reeks of desperation:

Tom Nichols at the Atlantic's take on the same: the GOP is a messy soap opera now:

This might be too much even for a Sorkin script. Trump’s reactions lately are so unhinged, so hysterical, that they could pass for one of those scenes in a soap opera where a drunken dowager finds out that her May-December romance is a sham, and she begs him, as mascara flows down her cheeks, to fly off with her to Gstaad or Antibes to rekindle their love.

More fanfic from the Trump camp

Gotta love that "popcorn" emoji

Emily Nussbaum on today's "General Press Conference": 

"I'm always struck by how closely Trump's querulous tone resembles that of his inspiration, Livia Soprano"

Some tweeter on the Assassination Attempt and That Photo:

"This is the fakest bullshit of all time.

What a sad pathetic clown.

This makes the WWE look like Shakespeare"

Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark says Pro-Wrestling Explains Why Trump Is Scared of Kamala

1. Trump as Vinnie Mac

We are seeing signs of panic from Donald Trump because he recognizes something in Kamala Harris that he has not seen in any other opponent: The beginnings of a cultural movement that vibrates at a level beyond politics.

He sees that Kamala Harris is drawing heat.

To explain this concept, we’re going to have to go deep into professional wrestling. This one’s going to be a journey. So strap in.

To understand Trump, you must understand professional wrestling.1Trump has long ties to the WWE and Vince McMahon, and Trump’s forays into wrestling formed his understanding of how populism and demagoguery function.

Here is how wrestling works:

The WWE was the creation of one man: Vince McMahon. McMahon was the Barnum of wrestling. Until recently, he alone decided who won and who lost, which characters were pushed and which faded into obscurity.

McMahon could be vindictive and capricious in his decisions, but at the most basic level he was guided by the audience. If a wrestler resonated with the crowd, McMahon would give them more work and elevate their standing. If a wrestler McMahon favored didn’t get a reaction, he would eventually sideline the wrestler or remake the character.

It is important to understand that the reaction McMahon looked for was value-neutral. It does not matter if the crowd loves a wrestler or hates him. In wrestling parlance this reaction is referred to as “heat” and there are two kinds of heat: (1) Heel heat, which is hatred and loathing on the part of the audience against villainous characters (known as “heels”). And (2) Face heat, which is love and adulation for heroic characters (known as “faces,” short for “babyfaces”).2

A wrestler’s most important job is to draw heat from the audience and it does not matter if the audience is booing or cheering. What matters is that they are loud and active.3 What matters is that the crowd cares.

Heat has been Trump’s political lodestar.

It explains why he pursued the Obama-birther story so doggedly even before he was running for president. It explains why he stopped talking about Operation Warp Speed. He’s even talked about heat explicitly, making fun of Republican audiences who yawn when he mentions about tax cuts but go crazy when he does trans issues.

In his lizard brain, Trump sees drawing heat as the pathway to dominating the culture and thus winning elections.

In this way, Trump is a savant. He has drawn heel heat more successfully than any figure in the history of American politics and used that power to take complete ownership of a political party.

So from Trump’s perspective, you can understand why he was so vexed by Joe Biden in 2020. No one really cared about Biden,4 who drew no heat, one way or the other. Biden was just kind of there, taking moderate positions and running a boring, effective campaign operation.

In Trump’s mind, his loss to Biden was the political equivalent of Hulk Hogan dropping the championship belt to some forgettable, mid-card talent. That’s not supposed to happen.5

2. Kamala as Daniel Bryan

Kamala Harris has succeeded—suddenly, unexpectedly—in drawing tremendous amounts of heat.

[the rest is hidden by the paywall - your guess as to who Daniel Bryan might be is as good as mine]

"The Republican voter is not attracted to ideas, but has a sense of alienation from elites and mainstream institutions, and simply wants someone loud and obnoxious enough to fight with them. And since he mostly just wants to grill and politics is a secondary concern in his life, he is not tuning in unless the show is particularly entertaining.

"Trump’s cultural predecessors are not previous Republican politicians like Bush or John Boehner. They’re talk radio hosts and TV personalities, except he’s better at their jobs than they ever were. It would be a mistake to try to understand why Rush Limbaugh had a larger audience than National Review by talking about his ideological differences with the magazine. Rush connected with the Republican base in a different way. He had an equal relationship with his audience in the sense that he met them at their level of understanding and sophistication, and used their preferred communication medium, but was also in a superior position in the sense that he was simply louder, fatter, and richer than they were, without trying to hide any of it." - Richard Hanania

"Trump is like a guy with an act that worked brilliantly and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work as well. You tell the same jokes but they don’t have the same punch...He’s struggling..." - James Carville

"Donald Trump has committed the one unforgivable sin of a carnival barker: he has become boring. 

This will be the death of him".

- Wajahat Ali

“He’s more like the aging rock star whose fans have kind of faded away, so it’s more like a reunion tour for him. It just doesn’t quite have the spark it had in 2016"

- David Jolly

 

"People forget that Trump's schtick always wears thin after a time. First season of the Apprentice got 20 million viewers, by season 4 it was down to 10 million viewers, and by season 8 it was below 5 million. Same thing has happened to him in politics."

 - Matthew Dowd

"We do not need 4 more years of bluster and bumbling, and chaos. We've seen that movie before, and we all know the sequel is usually worse" - President Obama at the DNC.

Birth of a meme - Trump as Vegas-era Elvis: 

"Don’t ignore the evidence of your eyes: Donald Trump is floundering, stumbling, and fumbling. Like a superannuated Fat Elvis, he’s desperately trying to play his greatest hits — Racism! Insults! Bullshit! — but it’s not landing the way it used to, is it?"

- Charlie Sykes, To The Contrary

"[Trump] seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis." - The Atlantic

 "Once you understand that Donald Trump is Fat Elvis—a washed-up playboy at the end of his career who's embarrassing himself daily yet doesn't know it—you can't unsee it. Everything about Trump is sad and broken down and sordid and gauche and over" - Seth Abramson

Mike Scott of The Waterboys goes one further with the analogy:

"We've already seen his every trick, move and gambit, from the lies to the nicknames to the bloody insurrection. He has no more surprises, no more ideas, nithing. Zilch. Nada. Dead Elvis."

Greil M won't appreciate  that - since the point of Dead Elvis was the uncannily pervasive and manifold afterlife that Elvis enjoyed posthumously, how vibrantly he haunted the culture

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"A quick overall comment on the last few weeks of American political history:

Whoever the scriptwriters are, they deserve every penny."

- George Conway

versus

"Don’t want to speak too early, but it really does feel like the electorate is ready to return to sane, boring politics.

Enough with the weird entertainment culture"

- Adam Kinzinger

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When Trump began attacking Harris in earnest, a couple of weeks ago, she condemned his remarks about her racial background as “the same old show.” I say, Let the show play on for at least a few more months. Every time Trump talks, he’s making the case for her.

- Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker

Hello (is it them you're looking for?)

 

but this is the Hall of Fame-r

Let's have it again (with an "Alternative Mix" no less)