1966: Muttering Small Talk at the Wall

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/godard_zpsbesoklbc.jpg http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/warhol_zpsobpkp5w2.jpg http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/dylan_zps1tg7tml4.jpg

A lot of great art has been made by non-white people who aren't boomers.

Voted james brown

Voted literally any woman

voted blowing my brains out

I was initially going to make it Dylan, Godard, Warhol, Janis Ian, and Bobby Hebb, but I experienced a loss of nerve at the last second. If you have concerns, I think it's important that you express them.

Would like to see Warhol in that shirt standing next to Dylan in those pants.

none of those fellas are boomers

i was way off. how about 'boomer icons.' artists who were culturally omnipresent or favored in the 50s, 60s, 70s and/or 80s at the latest. always white, usually male, with the major exception of pauline kael and various actresses. an endlessly rehashed guidebook and the only thing clemenza seems constitutionally able to post about.

That's about 92% true--now and again, something else catches my attention. I've never quite been sure why you don't just stay clear--I haven't been culturally omnipresent since the '80s at the latest--but I sometimes gravitate towards what drives me up the wall, so I know what that's like.

it's like beatles threads on ilm. yes you can stay clear but the accumulated momentum of people staying in the corners designated for them time and time again is just kind of sad. snark in response at least on my part is half 'please don't let me be that incurious at that age' and half 'maybe if i'm a bit of a dick they'll snap out of it.' both deluded to some degree. :/

I've never had a problem avoiding stuff I'm not interested in on ILX. (And don't forget, me not being interested in much of anything makes that extra challenging.) You're right, though--your strategic and well-intentioned rudeness is largely wasted on me.

and i mean these are all artists i like but god. no nutritional value left. plowing the same narrow field again and again.

xp

phone posting, sorry. not totally wasted. at least i ruined your shit thread for a few minutes.

i don't like these artists. well i guess i like one godard film. but i would pay actual money never to hear about any of them again.

Not really...I want you to get this out of your system, and then tomorrow, possibly, things can proceed from there.

Honestly, I don't know what to tell you. If I post about A, it means I'm interested in A. It doesn't mean I'm not interested in X, Y, or Z. A lot of stuff gets driven into the ground on ILX/M, James Brown and classic disco included. It's sort of the nature of this place. Most people seem okay with that.

if i hear any of these names intoned in conversation it's definitely time to get some air and think about leaving the party.

would go w/ godard because i love almost all of the films he directed in this period and suspect he prob is the greatest artist out of these three. love bob but this era isn't really what i love about him. don't really care about warhol's art, but like everything else about him -- the films, the factory, the velvets, the tell-all books. one thing they all have in common is that they're all very difficult to write about in a way that doesn't make them sound a lot more boring than they ever really were; like, if i'd never seen a godard film or heard a dylan album, reading a richard brody thinkpiece or a mojo retrospective wouldn't really inspire me to check them out.

http://cp91279.biography.com/1000509261001/1000509261001_1891997649001_History-Bill-Clinton-on-MLK-SF.jpg

Your sense of ground is highly questionable if you think classic disco is driven into it here when compared to bob dylan and the beatles, especially since one is an entire genre and the other is literally a few white men. there is no equivalence there at all, except yes there does seem to be an element of 'more exotic' topics x, y, and z getting discussed in the same way as if they're distant planets orbiting the mojo sun.

http://www.cubahora.cu/uploads/imagen/2014/11/01/indira.jpg

http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ernestomiranda640.jpg

That's why I kept politics out of it--as much as I love '66 Dylan, obviously he wasn't more important than MLK. Thanks for addressing the question, J.D. And Matt, you're right, the point about disco was an exaggeration. You do kind of bring out the worst in me, so you can take pleasure in that, too.

oh this is about artists

white artists.

yeah i don't think these 3 are really that important today

i love bob dylan but in 2015 he might as well be bobby vinton. nobody cares.

I think you'd get a lot of disagreement about Godard--his film last year topped many year-end lists--and some disagreement about Dylan (not from me--haven't been interested in anything he's done in 40 years). Anyway, hence 1966.

i'd be less cheezed if this was just "3 artist dudes i like", it has this objective-seeming air about it that just makes me think of robert hilburn railing against lady gaga

no offense

I like Lady Gaga...I had her song with Beyonce on a year-end list...help! (Not a Beatles reference.)

None of those three was ever under any circumstances the most important person in the world, Greil Marcus's mumbles to the contrary notwithstanding, but in 1966 Dylan was the newest, shiniest, most mysterious and least shopworn of the three listed there. He exerted more fascination than either of the other two, in art circles or with the general public, whether in NY, Paris or Sioux Falls.

The world moved on.

a lot of world-weariness on this thread

That's one thing I love about teaching grade 6. You talk about Warhol or Dylan (or James Brown), and it's all new. Some of them--not all, but more than you might think--are really, really interested.

Warhol was supposed to be the dumb one of this bunch, but the Andy Warhol Diaries is the funniest thing ever written by any of these people.

The other two are definitely artistic giants, but if we could somehow reconvene 50 years from now I would bet Warhol would be the most remembered.

Btw what's with the shades, was 1966 a particularly bright year?

It was part of all that legislation passed by LBJ in '65--you were obligated to wear them, even if you lived in France.

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/capote_zpskipignck.jpg

nobody cares.

this is kind of a badge of honor, really

peabrained PC of the left [sic] has an ever more hilarious home at ILX these days.

(that said, clem is mostly interested in my 3 chosen topics of baseball, cinema and politics and p much never expresses an original thought about any of them. ever.)

Out of those three, Dylan probably.

Out of the rest of the world, um... ooh...

voted Marlo Thomas

voted Jack Kirby

Dylan probably the biggest anti-singer of the 20th century, known for a god-awful voice, but in truth of course he could really sing beautifully. Also love the bit in "Don't Look Back" where he is going off on the Time Life writer. People nowadays rail about the media but it's in very general passive aggressive terms he was way more aggressive, "You should have a photo of a Rockefeller right next to a photo of a tramp throwing up in a ditch".

Warhol is like a Zen clown. Depth in the void, the pope of commercialism.

At some point in '66 Dylan has within 14 months released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde - and even though he has decades of great material left, in some ways him he'll never top that string of releases, and he's just about to crash.

In 6 years Godard has released À bout de souffle (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964), Alphaville (1965) and Pierrot le fou (1965) - and (shame on my Godard ignorance but) those are my favorites.

I don't know much about Warhol, but he was just about to take credit for the release of VU&Nico which is p awesome, so to me seems like he had more forward momentum.

But I'm voting Dylan bcz who knew in '66 + fanboy.

Godard "shopworn" by '66, not even worth a chuckle

Aimless must be a Michael Mann bro

I find the interest that each of them may or may not have had in the other two really interesting. I'm sure Warhol was acutely aware of both, although that probably translated as "Oh, he's great." Dylan would feign indifference, although was probably very aware. Godard, I don't know--obviously he was acutely engaged with the generation coming up, albeit at arm's length. Dylan famously hated Warhol, not sure if it was mutual.

I think Paul Morrissey, and probably Warhol, hated Dylan, or the people around him, for what they considered to be the adverse effect they had on Edie Sedgwick.

In other words, heroin.

i love bob dylan but in 2015 he might as well be bobby vinton. nobody cares.

― brimstead, Friday, June 12, 2015 12:52 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I CARE ABOUT THE POLISH PRINCE AND BOB DYLAN TYVM.

Actually I really don't.

Bobby Vinton did "Blue Velvet", which is pretty dang cool.

"I liked Dylan, the way he'd created a brilliant new style. He didn't spend his career doing homage to the past, he had to do things his own way, and that was just what I respected. I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around."

Andy Warhol in Popism (1980)

But he concedes later that he heard rumors that Dylan had turned against him...

"...I got the tenor of what people were saying - that Dylan didn't like me, that he blamed me for Edie's drugs."

Ha, that's the other way round from what i said, mind you I think it was Paul Morrissey rather than Warhol and Dylan's entourage (considered macho rock 'n' roll homophobes) rather than Dylan that there was animosity between

I think Dylan's screen test--especially when the right music is added (the original's silent, of course)--is incomparably beautiful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M--oHOn4a0U

Warhol only mentions Godard parenthetically in Popism as an example of something Susan Sontag wrote about a lot. No mentions in the Diaries.

Surprised...I always figured he would have been paying close attention to all the key European directors of the mid-'60s. Maybe he was and just didn't publically acknowledge it.

Should be noted that Warhol's Diaries only cover '76-'87

People nowadays rail about the media but it's in very general passive aggressive terms he was way more aggressive, "You should have a photo of a Rockefeller right next to a photo of a tramp throwing up in a ditch".

line i think about daily for some reason is "this is for people who want to know what's going on on a weekly basis".

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/culturalrevolution-140608102127-phpapp01/95/cultural-revolution-4-638.jpg?cb=1402222940

I Googled Dylan Warhol Godard out of curiosity and got a Film Comment review of the Todd Haynes Dylan film up top.

Three artists were the apotheosis of what we still feel compelled to call the Sixties: Dylan, Warhol, and Godard. Each enacted the depersonalized singularity that Deleuze describes. Warhol--the point of intersection between high modernism, self-fashioning gay sexuality, and the awareness of media technology in art, and moreover the great contemporary reincarnation of Oscar Wilde--has at all times been in Haynes’s aesthetic DNA.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-lives-of-others-im-not-there

Second was this thread, so I guess it's not that big a topic of conversation out there.

going off on the Time Life writer

RIP Horace Freeland Judson; supposedly gave up on writing about popular culture after the Dylan incident and got into science journalism instead

that is more than I can think of to say (or at least think might possibly be news to anyone reading this thread) than about the 3 poll nominees so I'll leave it there

the exchanges in Don't Look Back really are revealing of how unbelievably shitty press coverage was of rock music at the time, the condescension is so palpable. And this continued well into the 70s (Lou Reed's Australian press conf springs to mind)

It kind of set the precedent for rockist band feuds (the Donovan stuff is hilarious) and anti-press confrontational stuff. That stuff is still around and sort of the bread and butter to the industry these days.

I've responded very differently to that interview at different points in my life. I of course loved it the first time I saw Don't Look Back (20, 21?)--tell him, Bob. Whenever the last time was, some measure of sympathy for the reporter (probably just on assignment), and not quite as enamored of someone in love with the sound of his own voice (with a trace of scriptedness to it all, like the Hentoff Playboy interview). It's been a few years, so not sure how I'd react today.

The other "Reporter" also sacked it and started Charisma records instead.

as a teenager all my sympathy was for the writer; since getting his job it's shifted to bob.

(i was so much older then)

It's just indicative of a certain kind of press coverage - questions that were really incredibly stupid, patronizing, condescending, revealing of the journalist's total ignorance/disengagement from the subject, parroting of received wisdom, etc. I dunno how long it took for the press around popular music to really *engage* with their subject in a serious way, but it sure didn't happen in the 60s outside of a few venues that were in their infancy. Dumb coverage still happens and there are still shitty journalists and jousting w them is still a game/part of the racket of being a professional musician, it's just that in these first couple decades of rock it seems like it was taken as a given that the people making it were sub-literate morons who were not deserving of serious consideration, or even respect.

xp

you either played along and gave dopey or jokey answers to teeny-bopper questions or, in v rare cases like Dylan or the Beatles, you lashed out with sarcasm and invective

The brief Warhol interview clips I've seen from that time are also incredible. 1) Two-minute, densely worded question concerning art, love, mass communication, celebrity, consumerism, and the meaning of life. 2) "Um, yes?"

voted warhol because pittsburgh

(tbh it's silly the museum is there -- he obviously left as soon as he possibly could -- but i guess it stands out more there than it would in nyc)

hope that's ok with matt

i don't give a fuck about you either, just to be clear.

cool thx

not wishing i would die = compliment

Christ that Dylan screen test is brilliant. I do think this is kind of an oddly-grouped trio but of the three, Warhol, because I think Warhol gets the other two in ways they don't really get him.

lonely Warhol thinking baout Dylan & Godard

http://www.bohemia-apartments.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/warhol4.jpg

I don't believe that any of the 3 listed above were the most important people in the world at any point in 1966, but Dylan means a lot more to me than the other 2. But at a very general level I'm more into music than art or film, and I could probably name half a dozen musicians who were active in '66 that I'd take over those 2.

o. tm

Clearly the most important people in the world in 1966 were Sun Ra, Julie Andrews and Sandy Koufax.

i wonder how many ppl are really entranced by any of warhol's visual art nowadays. the electric chair prints are pretty striking and scary, but i can't say i get that much out of most of his work anymore. i think he's the only artist i've ever liekd whose work wasn't enhanced in any real way by seeing it in person.

wouldn't that delight him tho

wow

Warhol's art still looks impressive in person. He's definitely important if only for the fact that the screenprint punk style has completely permeated western culture, showing up on everything from DIY band flyers to TV motion graphics. If his pieces don't have the impact they once did it's because his aesthetic has saturated our culture.

And his "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" axiom keeps getting more and more true as time goes on. Youtube confessionals, reality TV, blogging, etc. There are behaviors and art actions prototyped in the Factory that are now standard daily operating procedure for anybody with a cell phone.

otm, I think he had a very keen sense of the general trends

Of the three, Dylan's work easily means the most to me. And I do love work from Warhol and Godard in and around this time. But what Dylan did in '65 and '66 stands apart from everything for me--from everything else that he did, and from everything anybody else did. He's even separated himself from Neil Young the past year or so. I have a mix-CD of maybe 15 songs from those two years (plus a couple from The Basement Tapes tacked on at the end) that I play constantly in the car.

But I think Adam has it right too. If I use who I enjoy talking to my students about the most as a measure, I'm able to connect Warhol to the world they know in a way that's much more difficult with Dylan. (Godard seems somewhere in between in that regard--his influence, while maybe not as pronounced as Warhol's, is also everywhere to be seen, and I love showing clips from his work.) There's so much there, in his work and in his life. Even when you look at the screen test above: what's there is Dylan's, but it exists because of Warhol.

If my grade 6 teacher had shown clips from Godard films in class, I would have liked grade 6 a lot more.

by complete chance i went to a warhol exhibit today that consisted largely of polaroids he'd taken at parties in the '70s, mostly of anonymous ppl doing movie-star poses. it was actually kinda sweet.

(xpost) Plus you get mind games, lectures, and moodiness as a bonus.

I saw the Warhol exhibit that David Cronenberg put together here a few years ago. They ran a lot of films concurrently at the Cinematheque--Chelsea Girls in a jam-packed theatre was an experience.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I'm more interested in music than in pop art or new wave cinema, so Dylan would seem to be the logical choice. But as far as '66 recordings goes, nobody means more to me than Cecil Taylor, and since the cover of Unit Structures owed a lot to Warhol, he gets the instinctive vote.

Also, I like VU+Nico as much as "Blonde on Blonde" and that one was recorded in '66 too.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I was glad to read the other day that women are still writing books and making films. There was some concern that this thread was going to bring that to a close forever--it was touch-and-go there for a while.

The Lightbox has a three-part Warhol program running this fall and winter: his films, Liz and Marilyn films, and an exhibition of various artifacts. I'm most looking forward to 80 minutes of the screen tests. Also ordered for The Chelsea Girls (which I saw once and found more memorable than boring), Kitchen, Poor Little Rich Girl, Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of, Lonesome Cowboys, The Nude Restaurant, Bike Boy, and Mrs. Warhol.

so just for fun i looked up 1966 in film and found that (via wikipedia):

(1) dino de laurentiis and john huston's the bible: in the beginning was the top grossing film in the US;

(2) fred zinnemann's a man for all seasons won an academy award for best picture.

(3) no notable mention of jean-luc godard. but maybe his style was too refined for us north americans.

i like a couple of his films. but generally, i find his films to be too stylised/too artsy and lack substance.

i did the same for music. though the biggest hit singles in the US were dominated by the beatles and the beach boys, bob released one of his greatest albums of all time, blonde on blonde. cool. i dig this album.

i don't care about art from 1966 and couldn't find anything of interest. that makes sense because if warhol was allegedly the most dominating figure of that time, it's no coincidence a lot of artists were moving towards that style. that is to say, garbage.

bob wins.

i'd rate jack kirby's art in fantastic four way 48-51 ahead of any pop art i've seen

^^ "way" should be after "48-51"

and i mean these are all artists i like but god. no nutritional value left. plowing the same narrow field again and again.

― e-bouquet (mattresslessness), Friday, June 12, 2015 4:13 AM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM, stupid thread... actually I have no interest in Dylan at all... why am I here? To say that Godard wins this particular poll easily.

Really, really stupid.

Saw the Screen Tests tonight. Not a film...seemed to be two separate compilations of about 40 minutes each. The most disappointing omission by far was Dylan's. I guess he intervened and made sure he wasn't included, although you can easily see his on YouTube. Dali's was missing, and I thought Dennis Hopper had done one too.

Extremely unnerving to sit in a theatre--especially a small one, with maybe 30 people in attendance--in absolute, total silence. (I've never seen a silent film that didn't have a score.) I had three friends on either side of me, and people directly in front; about 20% of my attention was hoping that my stomach didn't start to rumble, or that I didn't start coughing, or not to shift too loudly in my seat. It's the first time in my life I wanted people to make a little bit of noise.

I thought the screen tests were great. Sontag's was my favourite, Ed Hood's was the most audacious, and Taylor Mead once again cracked me up. The one with Gerard Malanga and another guy I didn't recognize, I'm curious as to whether that was shot before or after Persona (same year, probably). There are so many ways you could approach these. Mostly I thought of the stillness and the quiet in the middle of everything else that was going on at the time.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this, but I meant to add that the screen tests would make a great double-bill (Warhol playing first) with The Passion of Joan of Arc.