But can she boogie all night long? (two doses of Spanish kitsch)

As I try to prep two longer “profile” pieces I thought I should harken back to the earlier days of this blog with two lovely discoveries on YT. One West Coast blog, with a dozen writers on staff and advertisers to boot, has recently taken to doing what I and other solo (unpaid) bloggers have been doin' on a regular basis for years (namely touting interesting, odd, and “alternative” clips that have come to our attention). That blog has short entries and just highlights one clip or link at a time – I find it impossible to just leave the reader with one meager little offering, thus this double helping....

The theme, as the title indicates, is kitsch en el estilo Espanol. I start out with a female singing/dancing duo who were gigantic across Europe in the late Seventies but were barely (never?) heard of over here. The ladies were Mayte Mateos and María Mendiola, and their name as a duo was “Baccara.” They were dancers who began as flamenco/disco specialists (that's already two talents) and were converted into a successful musical act by a German record mogul and a Dutch producer-composer.

Baccara sold millions of records all across Europe, and Russia, and Japan, and the U.K. (similar to the kitsch-overload that was Boney M), starting with their wonderfully – and respectfully! – titled debut single, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie”:

That song became a “summer song” all across Europe in '77, so of course there needed to be a follow-up. In this case the English lyrics are even riper (“They don't make men like you in our city!”). Again, a comma in the direct address:

And because there is no better way to prove your “international” cred than by singing a song about the Old West, I present Baccara's Western saga “The Devil Sent You to Laredo.” The songwriter rhymes “Laredo” with “desperado” (des-peray-do) – what more can you ask for?

A few other Baccara tunes deserve honorable mention, particularly their covers of “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” and “Light My Fire” with a new opening (that includes the line “oh lover baby, why don't you reach out for love?”). Baccara in fact participated in the Eurovision Song Contest (after having had hit singles and somehow representing Luxembourg – don't ask).

Online biographies of the Baccara ladies emphasize the fact that they had an acrimonious break and have since formed singing duos with other women, both laying claim to being the “real” Baccara. In the meantime let's remember the ladies as they were, an elegant pair of Spanish dancers who happened to score major success singing odd songs in English. Like their tribute to men of the sea, “Ay, Ay Sailor”:
 

*****

Staying in the Spanish groove, I shift the spotlight from music to television with an extremely unique clip from the Spanish TV game show Un, dos, tres... responda otra vez. Politically correct it ain't.

First, some details about the show: Un, dos, tres... was on for 10 seasons broadcast over a 32-year span (1972 to 2004). I won't even try to elaborate its three-part construction, but it seems that the single best feature of the show (at least in its initial incarnation) is that there were a group of people cheering for the contestants to win (the host and his “secretaries,” cute babes wearing glasses) and another group haranguing them to lose (this should be tried on American shows). 

The clip below comes from the ninth season, which aired from 1993 to 1994. In that season two new twists were introduced to this already complicated show (in which contestants answered questions, did physical stunts, and then had an “auction,” consisting of “luck and psychological games” – !). The first change was in the rules – contestants now had to “buy” their way into later rounds.

The second alteration was that Paloma Hurtado, one of the well-loved women in the show's cast, to cite Wikipedia, “could not join the cast on the first months because she had been accidentally shot in the face weeks before the launch of the season and was recovering from the surgery.” Happily, Paloma returned to the show only a few months later.

But onto the clip. Here the show's theme is “The old Mississippi,” and actress Luisa Martin leads the contestants in a fun game that involves a bunch of white women “blacking” themselves up (UPDATE: a previous episode from 1982 contained a single "blacked-up" actor). I don't think this particular game will ever be played on American television:

I thank fellow kitsch aficionado (and game show expert) Rich Brown for leading the way to this strange gem.

The “invisible” auteur — "the Complete Howard Hawks” festival at the Museum of the Moving Image, now through November 10

Of all the master directors in Hollywood’s “golden age,” Howard Hawks remains the most enigmatic. Welles, Hitchcock, Ford, Lang, Von Sternberg — all had readily discernible visual styles, while Hawks avoided every kind of visual flourish and concentrated instead on pure storytelling. He also not only made films in just about every great Hollywood genre, he made seminal films in those genres, a feat that was beyond the mega-talents mentioned above.

A comprehensive festival of Hawks’ work (39 in all, spanning 44 years) — the first such in a long time in the New York area — is going on now at the Museum of the Moving Image in my old nabe of Astoria, Queens. In the past two weeks I’ve watched 10 of Hawks’ films (both at the museum and on disc in preparation for a segment on the festival for the Funhouse TV show), and Hawks’ mastery of genre remains breathtaking. The key bonus and blessing of this festival is that the features are all being shown ON FILM, which is getting increasingly rarer and rarer in this digital era.

But back to the films: In some cases Hawks reproduced genre tropes that were already around (could The Big Sleep have existed without The Maltese Falcon?) and in others he was devising the tropes himself — as with the screwball comedy, which he jumpstarted with Twentieth Century and perfected with Bringing Up Baby. But in all the films that weren’t mere “assignments” from studios (and there were few of those after the mid-Thirties) Hawks stuck true to his “codes.”

The Cahiers du Cinema critics in France (who of course later became the standard-bearers of the nouvelle vague) and Andrew Sarris in this country were the first to notice what Hawks’ seemingly dissimilar films had in common. The first tenet they deemed “the code of professionalism” — the fact that the heroes of his pictures took their professions very seriously, and that the mark of a person’s worth was how well they did their job.

This extended from Walter Huston risking his life as a steadfastly honest prison warden (The Criminal Code, 1930) to the trio of cowboys guarding a prisoner whose confederates want to bust him out of jail (Rio Bravo, 1959). One of the single best examples is the sublime Only Angels Have Wings (1939), in which Cary Grant plays a flyer in South America who is willing to lay his life (and those of his colleagues) on the line for what seem like ridiculously routine assignments.

The second tenet of a lot of Hawks’ dramas is that they concern a ragtag group of individuals who band together to accomplish something in a short span of time. This occurs frequently in his male-bonding films, which are miles away from today’s perception of machismo in the movies.

Sure, his characters were sometimes soldiers, had fistfights, raced cars, flew planes in dangerous weather, and indulged in lethal gun battles, but it’s the solemn, quiet nature of Hawks’ macho cinema that makes it so appealing. Especially when you compare it to present-day testosterone-charged, explosion-riddled Hollywood action pics. (The photo to the right shows Hawks showing Kirk Douglas how to throw a punch on the set of The Big Sky.)

And then there were the “Hawksian women.” Although he himself was a very old-fashioned gent (see the documentary below), he made numerous films featuring active, independent, wise-cracking women. His female characters frequently make the first pass at the men and are also career-minded — the perfect example being Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday (1940).

The men in Hawks’ screwball comedies are not the noble figures from his male-bonding pictures. They are generally dignified gents who have their dignity slowly stripped from them as they play the comic foil to the female leads. Cary Grant became the personification of that character, but Gary Cooper and Rock Hudson (in the underrated Man’s Favorite Sport?) did wonderful jobs playing essentially the same part.

Hawks’ visual style is indeed “invisible,” except for the feverishly wild compositions in Scarface (1932), his gorgeously-lit images of some of his female stars (most notably Bacall in To Have and Have Not), and "artsy" camera movements of his silent feature Paid to Love (1927). Sarris noted that he crafted “good, clean, direct, functional cinema, perhaps the most distinctively American cinema of all.” Hawks favored medium shots of his characters — to further Sarris' point, the composition is called the plan américain by the French.

The modernity of his characters certainly makes his films age well, but what about the lengths of his films? Both Hawks’ action pictures and his comedies are much longer than those by his contemporaries (for example, Rio Bravo is 141 minutes, and the very light-hearted Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964) is a full 120 mins).

There are two elements that make his films so breezy despite their somewhat daunting running times. The first, of course, is the casts — he flitted from actress to actress (although he did use Marilyn twice, both brilliantly), but he made five films with both Cary Grant and John Wayne (that fact alone says a lot about his disparate output), and worked more than once with Cooper, Cagney, Robinson, and Bogart. He also used memorable supporting actors, the uncommonly mom-like (or wife-like, if you please — see Mark Rappaport’s 1997 video-essay The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender) Walter Brennan being a favorite.

But the central reason Hawks’ films are so compulsively watchable despite their length is the roster of first-rank screenwriters he used. In addition to the great Ben Hecht, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett (whom he worked with a lot), he filmed scripts by Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond, Charles MacArthur, Dudley Nichols, Charles Lederer, W.R. Burnett, and John Huston. He also had the distinction of being the only director who had a sterling relationship with William Faulkner — he filmed several Faulkner scripts, including the seemingly unlikely Land of the Pharaohs (1955). One of the singular joys of seeing a bunch of Hawks films in a row is hearing the same lines of dialogue (and, in some cases, seeing entire physical bits of business) crop up in different films.

To conclude this overview, there is no substitute for clips. I urge those in the NYC area to check out the festival at the Museum of the Moving Image. MoMI had one of the best retrospectives of the last decade with its comprehensive Jacques Rivette fest (which I count as one of the most enlightening and important repertory festivals I’ve been to in my life). Most of the films in the Hawks-fest are not as rarely shown as those in the Rivette retro were, but the experience of seeing a number of them in a row, in pristine film prints projected on a screen in an auditorium, is one that can’t be beat.

*****

There are a few documentaries about Hawks available online (here is one in Spanish; here is one in French), but the best filmed interview with him took place in the 1970s when Richard Schickel was assembling the Men Who Made the Movies series. The episode about Hawks finds him open and honest about his opinions (and decidedly unimpressed by the Westerns of that era):

His first silent is lost, but the second one has survived and is quite charming. It starts out in the stone age and jumps to the present-day (and then back to the stone age!), telling the tale of a wife who has “nothing to wear.” There’s a lot of late Twenties fashion on display, and some pre-screwball sitcom-like comedy, in Fig Leaves (1926):

A scene from The Criminal Code (1930) that might seem laughable today — I would be willing to bet Lenny Bruce got his “yadda yadda, warden” (later appropriated by Seinfeld) from his scene — but which is still tense as hell. New warden Walter Huston decides to walk among his inmates unprotected:

Hawks loved the world of racing, but he only made two films about it. Here is a short segment from the Cagney classic The Crowd Roars (1932):

I am not a war movie fan and have yet to catch up to Hawks’ war pics (I will, I will), but I absolutely love Hawks’ aviator pics (in real life, Hawks had been a flyer and you can feel it in the films). The best of the bunch, and probably the film not already deemed a classic that I would *heavily* recommend in the MoMI festival, is Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Director Allan Arkush (Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) apparently feels the same way:

Hawks’ Scarface (1932) has been eclipsed by De Palma’s over-the-top ridiculous remake (one thing I will admit: both Paul Muni and Pacino give terrible performances). Here is a clip of directors Walter Hill and Michael Mann talking about the original:

The Big Sleep (1946) is one of the great detective films of all time. It’s not a comprehensible mystery (the pre-release 1944 version of the film makes more sense — but who really needs a noir-era mystery to make sense?). Here’s the great scene in which Bogart charms a book store clerk, played by a young Dorothy Malone (“you begin to interest me…”):

To show that Hawks truly did work in just about every classic Hollywood genre, here are scenes from a film he produced and supposedly co-directed, Christian Nyby’s The Thing From Another World (1951). It’s a classic Fifties paranoid sci-fi picture that concentrates on plot and characterization — the monster (played by James Arness) doesn’t appear until the very end of the film:

And speaking of classic H’wood genres, here’s the trailer for his big, brassy, Technicolor Fifties musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1952). There are many feminist studies of the film (it is Hawks’ one and only female bonding pic):

He made only five Westerns, but those qualify him in the first rank of Hollywood Western directors. His first was Red River (1948), a fascinating inter-generational saga that pits the old Hollywood (John Wayne) vs. the new (Montgomery Clift). The very notion of using the subtle, “sensitive” Clift in a Western is a radical one, and he is excellent facing off against “the Duke.” Here he discusses guns with John Ireland (hey, no one ever said these films weren’t highly Freudian):

One of the best-ever Hollywood major studio Westerns is Rio Bravo (1959). It doesn’t have the psychological complexity and gorgeous location-shoot visuals of the films of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, but is a hands-down masterpiece as both a Western and a male-bonding picture:

Hawks’ movies will continue to be watched by generations to come, but it is perhaps his screwball comedies that are best loved by old movie fans of the current era. There are no good clips online from his first great screwball opus, Twentieth Century (1934), so we jump straight to the masterwork. Could there have been I Love Lucy or any of the sillier, broader TV comedies of the Fifties and Sixties without the superb Bringing up Baby (1938)? Here’s a short scene (sans Katie Hepburn) that shows again what a modern director Hawks really was:

His Girl Friday (1940) is another Hawks comedy that was a wellspring of a lot of modern situation comedy. This remake of The Front Page proceeds at a frantic pace and is one of the greatest “battle of the sexes” comedies. It fell into public domain some years ago, so copies of it can be found everywhere (it is available in its entirety online, but is, again, best seen on a movie screen).

Here is a sequence that clearly inspired the overlapping dialogue found in the work of Funhouse favorite Robert Altman (when asked about his use of many characters speaking at once, Altman would point to screwball comedies as having done it years before he did).

Ball of Fire (1941) is Hawks directing a script co-written by the inimitable Billy Wilder. Here is a little segment in which the professors are exposed to modern slang:

I Was a Male War Bride (1949) is a miraculously odd creation – a film that is half “sexual tension” battle-of-the-sexes, and half gender-bending comedy in which Cary Grant is the “wife” of his U.S. WAC wife (the fact that he’s supposed to be a Frenchman makes no sense whatsoever, but hey…). Here’s the scene at the midpoint of the film where the plot switches gears:

Hawks’ last movie with Grant was the high-energy farce Monkey Business (1952). Here’s the trailer:

The final Hawks screwball comedy is Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964). Rock Hudson stars as a fishing “expert” who has never actually fished in his life (he’s just absorbed info from customers in the store he works in). The film finds Hudson playing yet another character who is hiding something — we return to Mark Rappaport, this time to Rock Hudson’s Home Movies.

The film was not a major success, but has acquired a cult in the half century since it came out. It clearly was “out of time,” appearing only a few month before A Hard Day’s Night changed the tone of screen comedy, but it holds up surprisingly well, thanks to its clever scripting and solid lead performances (it’s got to be Paula Prentiss’ finest moment in film). Here’s the trailer:

And it’s always best to close off with a song. One of the most unlikely scenes in Rio Bravo — but one which comes off perfectly — is the odd moment where Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson duet on “My Rifle, My Pony and Me.” Walter Brennan then joins them (!) for “Cindy,” a song I mentioned in my Dolores Fuller obit, as she re-wrote it for Elvis. Dean, Ricky, and Walter are doing the traditional North Carolina folk tune version, discovered by John Lomax:

Basic Black: Deceased Artiste Karen Black on the Funhouse

It's been a few weeks now since Karen Black's death, and I've been trying to think of what to say to summarize her career, her life, and the short time I spent in her presence doing one of the strangest Funhouse interviews ever.

First let me say that the run of great films she made between 1969 and '76 constitutes a really incredible body of work. She played a range of characters, from sharp to dumb, city girl to country hick, glamor girl to ugly duckling. Over the next three and a half decades she had an occasional good role, but the fascinating films she made in that seven-year period are her greatest legacy.

As for her life, I know only what I read about her. Her final months were spent combating a terrible sickness, reaching out to her fans for financial help (the tragedy of America's healthcare situation – we are the only “first world” country without nationalized care – remains the single most backward and awful aspect of our country). She worked steadily over the past four decades, appearing in a major amount of disposable genre pics, but every so often would get a featured role in an indie film that was worth watching. There weren't many, but they did appear....

As for my interview, it was indeed a “strained” affair for its first half. If I have the time I do like reviewing the subject's career – with Black that entailed asking her first about the lurid Herschel Gordon Lewis movie The Prime Time (1959). She acted for the first time onscreen in that film – she told me she was 12 and still living at home, but she was actually 20 and didn't have another film role until the absolutely wonderful 1966 Coppola NYC comedy You're a Big Boy Now (costarring, among others, the great Julie Harris, who died just this past weekend).

The interview continued to hit speed bumps – the oddest being an interruption that made it seem like she'd have to go entirely. Instead we began again and for whatever reason, her answers began to be more expansive, a bit more friendly, and refreshingly honest. As when she dismissed about a decade of her films and when she noted “that there are good horror movies and bad horror movies, but most of them are bad” – a truth I'm sure she learned firsthand.

The best moments of our chat were when she discussed the craft of acting and the work she had done with exceptional directors (Rafelson, Altman, Hitchcock). Some years back when I was putting together a “demo reel” for the Funhouse, I included this small sliver of our chat, in which she talked about ad-libbing in Nashville.

Here, however, is the rest of what she had to say about Robert Altman, who I fervently believe was and is one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time. Much has been said about improvisation on his sets, but I had never heard a performer discuss his lack of marks for the actors.

This came about when she talked about the play and movie Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. I'm very, very glad I had the experience of seeing the Broadway production of the show directed by Altman. I went to a Wednesday matinee of the show, filled with little old ladies sitting around looking bewildered. One of the blue-haired attendees was in fact so bored she broke out her knitting.

I loved the show and was particularly taken with the way it was set up: when the actors were in the front of the stage they were in the present (the mid-1970s), when they went to the back, they were in the past (the mid-1950s). Most of the old ladies couldn't figure this out, and absolutely all of them were confused by the absence of Cher (who was onstage from the curtain going up, but was dressed "down" as a waitress). When Karen Black entered as the glamorous transgender character a few of them audibly said, "that's her... that's Cher!"

The play had a short run of 52 performances on Broadway and was turned into the first of Altman's “filmed plays” in 1983 (he shot the film on Super-16 converted to 35mm and secured the budget from, among others, Mark Goodson Productions). He took the special step of carefully delineating the two time periods in the film – when the characters are seen in a mirror they are indeed in the past (in different outfits that show they are younger; onstage they simply acted younger and were, again, in the back part of the set).

The film still isn't on DVD in the U.S. But copies of it are still circulating on VHS and on the “torrential” side of the Net from foreign TV.

Here is what Ms. Black said about being directed by Altman, first in Nashville and then again in Come Back to the Five and Dime.....

A post-mortem on the Metropolitan Museum’s punk fashion exhibit

In its quest to recreate the magical mayhem (read: long lines and big $) that accompanied the 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibit, the folks at the Met conceived of “Punk: From Chaos to Couture,” a truly ridiculous tribute to what was a lively and often ugly “movement” distinguished by its anti-fashion and back-to-basics attitude.

I am reviewing this uncommonly "pretty!" tribute to an intentionally garish way of dressing and accessorizing — that was inextricably linked with an important musical movement — a few days after it has closed. But I’ve noticed that The New York Times frequently “gets around” to reviewing art exhibits just as they’re closing (more fun to make the rabble scamper to something interesting), so if they who are paid can do that, I can most certainly conduct a post-mortem on the punk show for the no-pay that blogging confers upon its participants.

I was underaged when punk hit NYC, but the “fashion,” if it should be called that, was everywhere, and the music was indeed getting airplay on certain fringe radio stations (I vividly remember a show called “Punk-o-rama” on WHBI at the top of the FM dial – “rip up my school books/tear down the dirty looks/this/is punk-a-rama!”). By the time I was attending concerts “new wave” music was in full effect – these shows took place in venues with no liquor license.

In the decades since that galvanizing explosion – which took some time to be heard in other parts of the world (thus the docu title 1991: the Year Punk Broke) – it's become apparent to anyone who listens to the music that there were excellent punk bands and many, many shitty ones. There were people grouped under the punk umbrella who didn't make “punk rock” at all (Blondie, Television, even Patti Smith). It was a musical movement that thrived on the live concert experience, but those concerts are long gone (as are the venues), and so the “summing up” began as early as the late Eighties.

And then there was the fashion. As with hippie fashion, it was basically dressing “down,” wearing shitty clothing that shocked older folk, getting jarring haircuts and affecting whatever was the utter opposite of the hippie/hard rock look (long hair, bell bottoms, sideburns, halter tops, whatever). It was rebellion pure and simple, and it fed off of the rebellion of the past. And like past rebellious movements, it gave birth to a bunch of shit culture in its wake. When a rebellious sense of fashion is codified, it officially is dead (even though wildly colored mohawks were still seen in the Village up until the early Nineties).

What the Met programmers did with their little punk outing was to show how “ugly fashion” was transformed into “pretty!” dresses and ensembles. They wanted to show how the punk movement lived on, but instead they emphasized how its worst poser aspects influenced subsequent generations of posers. They acknowledged the music, but truly rooted the show in the fashion world – all the better to recapture that McQueen vibe (his stuff was present in the very first room of the exhibit, natch – and I did like his crazy-ass goth-meets-H.R. Giger exhibit, by the way).

So you entered and saw a recreation of the CBGB men's bathroom – oh, for the sweet cuteness of a disgusting toilet recreated as a museum exhibit (idea for true modern art experience: not only visual input, but *smell* and stickiness on the bottom of the shoes score points for verisimilitude). And not even rendered in its truly, truly graffiti-covered nastiness (the source photo used was from early on in the club's existence – that men's room was fucking disgusting, and therein lay the “mystique” of the place. Life as it lived, no prettifying anything ever, deal with it or go home).

That little intentionally shabby nook was followed by several rooms of punk fashion, progressing from a recreation of Vivienne Westwood's shop “Clothes for Heroes” to several groupings of dresses and outfits that looked weird and spacey (paging Alex Mc), and finally ending with items created for Dolce and Gabbana and Dior in the 2000s that were “inspired” by punk.

Gone was the shocking, disturbing, and abrasive edges of the homemade punk look. As with most haute couture, this stuff could never be worn on the streets of any city anywhere, and if it was you wouldn't wind up bleeding for your troubles (or having the fabric tear).

Surrounding the fashions were some punk sounds (the most famous artists from NYC and London), plus filmed images on video – of which the only one that was truly jarring was a person in a bondage mask (or was it a scuba mask – who the fuck knows, it was jarring and that's all that mattered) in some cityscape standing around being generally weird and impressively disturbing. The walls had graffiti on them: mottos like “Destroy Capitalism,” “Punk is a revolution for countries that don't allow revolution,” and other items like that.

Throughout the five or so rooms of high fashion, one got the distinct feeling that the only way to make the show “legitimate” would be to have the galleries trashed by people who had a true sense of artistic vandalism (a fashion show based on punk is dying for a Magic Christian-like statement in which everyone who enters the gallery gets randomly gobbed on or some such). Graffiti slogans and cleaned-up digital video doesn't quite convey the anarchy and randomness of whatever could be called the punk “ethos.”

I saw Brian Eno speak at MoMA back in the Nineties during a “High and Low” art exhibit, and he lamented that Duchamp's Fountain – the famous toilet with the name “R. Mutt” inscribed on it – couldn't be used for its initial purpose. He mused on the fact that it was under glass (in that show – subsequently I'm sure I've seen it out in plain air) and secured from the touch of bystanders.

He fantasized about getting urine in the bowl and thereby cheering up Duchamp, and anyone who had a sense of humor and playfulness (and utilitarianism). The closest the punk exhibit got to any sort of acknowledgment that punk clothing was CHEAP clothing by its very nature were the wall-texts that explained the derivation of punk, including John Rotten's famous quote that “when the arse of your pants falls out, you use safety pins.”

So, what did tourists experience? A quaint look at a long-ago pop-culture movement that rebelled against everything that was mainstream, and was (as per the usual) gobbled up by the mainstream and transformed into something “pretty!” and worthy of aesthetic consideration. It was bullshit, but then again Orson reminded us in F for Fake about the question the Devil himself asked when he saw the first man make the first crude drawing: “it's good... but is it art?”

The last word on this artistic farrago – where one of the more affordable items in the gift shop was a set of pencils with quotes from Sid Vicious on 'em (!) – was provided by a guy who I am *sure* never went to the exhibit and also never was the biggest fan of punk. But he was around at the time, and he respected the rebellion enough to summarize cogently what the Met's exhibit “meant.” Read the words of decoder of popular culture tropes (and one of America's best writers) Nick Tosches writing for style.com. A few paragraphs (read the whole article here):

"Have you ever read a definition or description of any kind of music, be it plainsong or punk? Lifeless and untelling compared with hearing even just a few breaths of the music itself.

"Nobody can say where it came from or where it went, and we should beware always of those who would bring sociology or any other ology to rock 'n' roll.

"[...]Thus, we have Punk: Chaos to Couture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not the Museum of Modern Art, but the big one. The vast Gothic Revival mausoleum of the greatness of the ages. Giotto, Botticelli, Raphael, Rembrandt, mummified Egyptian guys. The big one.

"Museums. "Art appreciation." If you have to be taught to appreciate something, it can't be much good. Who ever heard of sex appreciation, drug appreciation, pork-chop appreciation? I shall not forget being asked to extinguish my cigarette at the Apocalypse exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2000. Welcome to the end of the world: No smoking allowed."

Epilogue: Research shows that the theme song to that “punk-a-rama” was the product of a Kim Fowley prefab, post-Runaways teen guy-fronting-girl-band combo, Venus and the Razorblades. My fond memories of this defiant ode, as is always the case, are tarnished (or at least made into quaint kitsch) by the reality involved – kinda like mindset that produced the Met show.

Jeezis, this is a ridiculous ditty, kinda like the “Life is a Rock (but the radio rolled me)” of punk. Enjoy (if ya can):

******

As I walked through the punk exhibit, I did begin to wonder if there was a fitting “punk anthem,” since the music chosen by the Met was painfully obvious. There are many, many seminal punk tunes, all of which could be declared to present the punk “sound” (right, right, there WAS NO punk sound, it was a conglomeration of influences and rebellions against arena rock and “album-oriented” MOR).

Iggy's “I want to be your dog” is probably the archetypal punk tune (the live versions, without the lovely bells), but there are several other songs that could qualify as anthemic punk tunes.

First and foremost, the Dead Boys' “Sonic Reducer.” The influences are here (Iggy, Yardbirds and the louder Sixties British bands), but everything else is new. And short, man – short songs were the very essence of punk:

The Sex Pistols were either the epitome of a punk band (esp. with the inclusion of the absolutely unable-to-play El Sid) or the ultimate concept in fake entertainment by Mr. McLaren. Whatever the case is, John Lydon's hooks are still catchy, and you can't possibly fault a band that sings the immortal lines “We're so pretty/oh so pretty/vacant.”

When it comes to bands that transcended the label punk, the Clash are the prime example. The tension between Joe Strummer's pure and simple rock 'n' roll and Mick Jones' refined pop songsmithing produced some eternally playable albums. As for their punk anthem?

A key song in any history of punk is the item below from X-Ray Spex. It is incredibly important because it voices the female teen’s point of view, something which was not heard much in punk. The late, great Poly Styrene wrote and sang the song, which is as close to a teenage cri de coeur  as you’re going to get during the punk era (yes, yes, Poly was actually 20 when the single came out, but it distills everything that repulses teens about adult culture).

Poly’s lyric rejects men’s oppression of women and age’s oppression of youth, but she could equally have been talking about the bondage strain in “punk fashion.” Her own outfits were pure thrift-store style — it’s hard to imagine her being chosen by Westwood as a model for her duds.

Those music producers packaging “punky chick” teen pop-tarts (looking at you, Avril Lavigne) might wanna take a listen, just so you know what you’re ignoring:

 
The Met had certain individuals spotlighted as “poster children” for the punk exhibit. The key figures who wound up on the merchandise they were selling in the gift shop (I'm talking refrigerator magnets in addition to postcards) were Debbie Harry (alluring, a great singer, but punk – ??) and Richard Hell.

Hell is a fascinating subject, in that he did create some great music and has established himself as a fine writer and reviewer in the years since his music career dissipated or was suspended, or whatever went on there. The song has been labeled his ultimate statement by critics is this snappy ode (which McLaren admitted had inspired “Pretty Vacant”), “The Blank Generation”:

What makes it hard to declare the above a true punk anthem is that its melody and concept were swiped from a novelty record (or is the claiming of someone else's work part of the artistic statement?). Bob McFadden and “Dor” (Rod McKuen) had a big novelty hit with “The Mummy” in 1959, and around the same time released a single called “The Beat Generation.” Hell appropriated the tune and the concept and is still listed as sole composer of “Blank Generation.” I love his lyrics for “Blank,” but it's wild to compare the two and realize that one is a direct swipe of the other:

I would also put into contention as an anthem this ditty by the Cramps that in 1979 already acknowledges the poser component of a lot of punk in its opening lines (“You ain't no punk, you punk/you wanna talk about the real junk...”).

I have an endless admiration for Lux Interior and the exquisite and talented Ms. Ivy Rorshach, and there is something timeless about all the great recordings by the Cramps. Their style was more “psycho-billy” than punk musically, but their approach was minimalist, absolutely pure rock 'n' roll – and they wore their influences on their sleeves so wonderfully that it's no doubt that they (and Lenny Kaye – all credit to those who matter) who really spearheaded the “Underground Garage” concept decades before that radio enterprise began. This is garage, and it is punk also (and yeah, the video is the template for a lot of goth):

Patti Smith's music wavered between brilliant hook-driven rock and pure poetry (obviously). The closest she came to providing a punk anthem of sorts is “Rock and Roll Nigger,” a song that never got air play for obvious reasons. It combines her poetry, her concern for all things aesthetic and beautiful (not “pretty!” mind you, but beautiful), it has a hook to kill for, plus it's very minimal and angry. The fact that the song ends with the refrain “outside of society...” sez it all:

The only place to end this is with the band who are identified by most as being the ultimate punk icons. Again, their music was very different from basic punk – they combined surf, bubble gum, garage, and the bliss of sailing right through a set. All the acts above were terrific (I am an addict for them all), but it's hard to pick a more goddamned FUN band than the Ramones.

And, screw fashion, Joey and crew dressed in torn jeans because they were goofy, no-budget guys from Queens. All hail the guys whose records were never played on the radio, but we loved 'em so (fuck that – love 'em, present tense). Now the t-shirt with the emblem designed by the late Arturo Vega is *everywhere* on the streets of every major city, and they are seen as “stylemakers.” Life is funny, fashion pathetic.