Saturday, September 23, 2006

I believe Andy is referring to the Paradise Garage. The home of legendary DJ Larry Levan. The sex machine Levan--Frankie Knuckles' partner in crime. Both had played at the [in]famous bath houses in NYC; then Frankie moved to Chicago, where he founded his club the Warehouse, and where the term "house" was coined, in part because whatever he played at his club was called house. "House music all night long, house music all night long..." Today house is considered an evolution of Disco, and so is Garage, although Garage does not have the same popular position as house music. Like the term House, Garage was coined based on the style of play by Levan at the Paradise Garage. Check the morphings of the term Paradise Garage online:

This one is literally an actual car garage, If you are considering investing in the world's most famous car brands, you are well advised to talk to the right people. Did you know we have the most experienced team servicing Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars in Australia?

Paradise Garage offer you the services of factory-trained technicians, in a workshop of superb equipment, with a fully-stocked parts department, all supported by a small staff of real enthusiasts.

If you have a pristine or low kilometre car and are thinking of selling, talk to us.

This one is another car "paradise" in the U.S., Located across from the world famous Lime Rock Park racetrack in northwestern Connecticut, the Paradise Garage is a dealership of fine sports cars, classics, and vintage vehicles.

Our 3000 sq. ft. showroom houses some of the rarest and most sought after European and domestic automobiles in the world.

And then you get a site in memory of the Legendary Garage, The idea I have for this site is to try and give you a glimps of what it was like to work and play at the Garage. Just tell some stories, tell some tales, show you some movies, and hopefully make you smile.
Needless to say this site is not about the "Meaning of House Music" or the origins of the word "Garage" or anything like that . . . lord knows there is enough of that out there on the internet already. I want this site to travel in a more organic and personal direction.
I will post links to information that I think is well put together, information that tells a more accurate story about the Garage and Larry Levan. It will give people who are unfamiliar with the club an idea of what the Garage was all about. Hopefully in the process I will come up with material that is new and more factual.
So hang out, bookmark it, . . . and enjoy the ride.

Andy and a bodyguard. I never pictured him with protection. I guess after the Solanas incident he felt he had to. And he was so superstitious, that whole mystical thing with Dr. Bernsohn, so odd. And Matty, Andy's "bodyguard", sounded just like a terrorist might today--or at least he would be looked under that frame at some point. Odd, no? It all shows that these conflicts we live today go way back, and have bounced around in different parts of culture in unexpected ways.

And Andy complaining about having to milk his Campbell Soupcan Paintings forever reminds me a lot of Madonna. Like Andy was complaining twenty years after he created the paintings about having to make them still, Madonna was also complaining more or less twenty years later about having to sing "Like a Virgin" (Hook the gossip):

Startrip80
04-11-2001, 11:37 PM
"If I have to sing Like a Virgin one more time Im going to kill myself"

She also said that she will never ever do "Into the Groove" again because of all her songs, she hates that the most. Another song she said she will never do again is "Material Girl". And she said the only song she really feels she can still relate to is "Holiday" so Im sure we can expect that one. Especially since she divulged us at Brixton.

~Alan~
np: Madonna ~ I Deserve It

gotta check the lyrics:

Like A Virgin

Written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly

I made it through the wilderness
Somehow I made it through
Didn't know how lost I was
Until I found you

I was beat incomplete
I'd been had, I was sad and blue
But you made me feel
Yeah, you made me feel
Shiny and new

Like a virgin
Touched for the very first time
Like a virgin
When your heart beats
Next to mine

Gonna give you all my love, boy
My fear is fading fast
Been saving it all for you
'Cause only love can last

You're so fine and you're mine
Make me strong, yeah you make me bold
Oh your love thawed out
Yeah, your love thawed out
What was scared and cold

Like a virgin
Touched for the very first time
Like a virgin
With your heartbeat
Next to mine

Oooh, oooh, oooh

You're so fine and you're mine
I'll be yours 'till the end of time
'Cause you made me feel
Yeah, you made me feel
I've nothing to hide

Like a virgin
Touched for the very first time
Like a virgin
With your heartbeat
Next to mine

Like a virgin, ooh, ooh
Like a virgin
Feels so good inside
When you hold me, and your
heart beats, and you love me

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
Ooh, baby
Can't you hear my heart beat
For the very first time?

What paintings did Keith and Andy give to Madonna and Sean? Could they be online?

Hmm... found an image along with a really good theft investigation account (so good, I got it take it all):

The next time you're in Madonna's house, ask her about that distinctive painting on the kitchen wall. It's a rare collaborative piece by the late artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring and was given to Madonna as a wedding gift when she married Sean Penn in August 1985 (the painting features a silk screen of a New York Post front page adorned with Haring's trademark baby figures). But three years later, the artwork was stolen from Madonna's California home, triggering an extensive FBI probe, an investigation detailed here for the first time, thanks to bureau records obtained by The Smoking Gun. The stolen property case, which started in Los Angeles and subsequently involved five other FBI offices, was opened in mid-1988, with agents interviewing Haring and representatives of the Warhol estate. But it wasn't until early-1990 that the FBI located the paintingó-thanks to a stroke of luck. In February 1990, a Rhode Island art dealer brought the painting to New York to have it authenticated by the Warhol estate (the dealer planned to buy it for $40,000 and wanted to confirm that the piece was an original). But a sharp-eyed Warhol employee, who had first been contacted by the FBI in 1988, immediately called the bureau and told agents that--amazingly--the artwork had just been left with the estate for authentication. Agents quickly seized the painting, which was eventually returned to Madonna (the artwork was valued at $400,000 in late-1990). Nobody ever got prosecuted for the theft, but FBI agents thought that the man who tried to sell the painting to the Rhode Island dealer was "a likely suspect." Memos indicate that the unnamed guy admitted to a prior drug problem and claimed to have originally purchased the Warhol-Haring painting for $15,000 and a 1932 Ford. Thanks to FBI censors, the suspect's name--not to mention those of Madonna, Penn, and the Warhol employee--have been blacked out from these documents. But a clear account of the art caper still emerges.[...]

Ah yes, I do remember the Madonna and Penn's wedding.

Claim to Fame: Their love was as explosive as a train wreck--and just as spectacular. From their February 1985 introduction (on the set of her "Material Girl" video) to their Malibu wedding that August (with press helicopters churning overhead and drowning out their vows) to their 1989 divorce, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone and Sean Penn teetered between rapture and rupture. These opposites didn't just attract--they collided.

I was already living in Los Angeles at that time. My memory is more like a meta-memory in that I recall images of a helicopter hovering over not only the Malibu property where the wedding was taking place, but also over other helicopters. It was really odd--like seeing how the whole thing was constructed, and I'm sure the helicopter crew was saying "Damn, we need to get closer, but all we can do is cover the news with these other helicopters in front of us." And now I think it was a brilliant image to keep in my head, it's like when you visit a TV studio and get to see the cameras that shoot the newscasters. I remember seeing footage where Madonna and Sean Penn had to run inside of the house because the wind was so strong--that was a close shot too; well, not so close they kind looked like ants, actually still. I admit it looked really annoying, and then I remember footage taken directly from one of the very helicopters creating the mess with the wind. It was like "look how I show you what mess I'm making... hey, hey?!!? Where ya goin' Let's party guys--don't take the party inside now, come on!"

But part of me believes that the tip came from inside. Someone working for Penn or Madonna. I mean, they had to be on the news, right? No... right. Who knows, it's big time history now, and I'm sure people who attended look back on it with a attitude like "yeah... I was there..."

And Tom Cruise!! What a mess he's into now! I like the guy but he's got to get it together. He's on the news for the wrong things, and being dropped by Paramount, I mean that's like a wake-up call. He's lost it... I mean, he even has a site dedicated to his nuttiness (that cartoon kicks real ass):

Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Cruise has tossed off the shackles of Hollywood oppression and is piloting his Scientology-fueled funny car straight towards you. The tires are smoking and he's screaming to the stands about Katie, psychiatry, sex, space aliens, and Brooke Shields. We invite you to grab some popcorn and watch for a few minutes before the crash...

Andy was definitely in a funk on August 5, 1985. I do remember Rock Hudson's death:

With Rock Hudson's death on 2nd. October 1985 AIDS came out of the closet and a turning point was reached with the public awareness and funding for the disease. However, it would be two years before Ronald Reagan, Rock Hudson's longterm friend, would be able to bring himself to talk publicly about AIDS.


I was really shocked as I had no idea that he was gay. To be honest, I never paid much attention to him. I was an average pop consumer who was not very critical of the media at the time, I guess. I was just a kid then, so my only reference was my sister's crush on him. And I thought, "he's gay? But he's so manly? huh?" I didn't get it.

I remember thinking that stars were untouchable when it came to AIDS. And it really scared me. I was naive enough to think they were perfect and were not touched by the insecurities and problems of the real world. I was barely entering my teens, so seeing Hudson's face all over the media was a real eye-opener in many ways.

And 1985 was an odd year, as at the same time Hudson's image is all over the news, we had Madonna all over the media with her nudity and the playboy scandal. And Andy is right, so what?

Things we do in the past can and often do comeback, I guess, but now this is even more true with the Internet. Much of what people do publicly online stays there, and can be looked up, and recontextualized with great ease these days. I think the new technology and the transparency it offers will definitely change the way we live. Politics have changed already, and certainly will. I can't wait for the day that someone who is running for president is pegged down for a blog s/he wrote on during his/her teen years. Yeah, gotta wait for that one. Or maybe the Internet will be much more controlled then and things will be kept from public access, making it more like the media before the net. Who knows. Speculations are certainly at play.

Funny, 'cause I thought that Andy was talking about Keith Richards, but I think he meant Keith Haring. Pretty sure, especially since Andy Keith (Haring) were known to have given Madonna and Sean Penn paintings for their wedding, something that was coming up around this time. (I'll comment on this in a later post.) It was that acid party that threw me off I guess. I mean, Keith Richards has, what I would dare call, "respect" for having done what he has done, if you know whad'im sayin'... He even inspired the character of Captain Jack Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp, in the film Pirates of the Caribbean. And I have to admit that Depp is not bad when impersonating Richards.

I mean, whenever I saw Richards interviewed I was ready to see him either go to sleep or throw up, or both (in that order...) Would take some real skills and a long term investment in the art of drinking to do it with grace too, but if there is anyone who could do it, it would be the great Keith Richards. I mean, I gotta give it to him, even today when he plays the guitar, he is so comfortable with it that it just... works--he hits the strings, and it sounds like him--it sounds really good, like Rock & Roll, and "I like it"..., and he looks like he's on acid every time, or a combination of drugs. Or maybe he's just like that permanently. You know? Like permanently stoned--brain gooone...

In any case, that's not the Keith we should be talking about. it's the red Haring who should be game in this entry. but there's not much to say about Haring, except that he was definitely hooked up with Andy when it came to the Artworld.

Check the word, from Being Smart Artists:

Products meeting the search criteria

to being it for investment:
Investment Art Andy Warhol,Haring,Wesselmann and more

And Haring did appear to party hardy (and painted hardy too):

Haring adored being the centre of attention and partied as hard as he painted. To New York's groovy underground culture, he was the pip in the Big Apple. Socially, his biggest asset was Warhol, whom he had met at an exhibition in 1983. The two enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, Haring feeding Warhol the latest youth culture, Warhol easing Haring into star-studded circles. Haring hobnobbed, too, with the great disco divas and drag queens of the day: Gwen Guthrie, Jocelyn Brown and Lady Bunny. His spectacularly theatrical parties became legendary. At one of his birthday bashes, Boy George sang Happy Birthday. At another, Madonna trilled Like A Virgin on a bed strewn with white roses.

And that whole thing about trying to make your parents feel old that Jade was supposedly trying to push on Bianca and Mick, is not happening anymore. Times have changed, and people today can have grandchildren and still be very "young." People living longer has pushed culture to reconsider age--that of course is a total construction, we know. Now they say that the 40s are the new 30s. I remember when I was in my early twenties watching a show called thirty something. It was all about middle age crisis, and then just a couple of years ago, Everybody Loves Raymond had an episode where Raymond was having a major middle life crisis because he was turning forty, and I thought... "forty... middle-life? Huh?" And then you have rumours in the states that retirement should be moved from 65 to 70. "The seventies are the new sixties" was another statement I heard. I can't help but think that it might have something to do with the baby boomers retiring in mass very soon... But issall Kool 'cause then it all means I'm real young still.

Yes, this whole issue of ideas being in the air has gotten really interesting since the web took off. What's even more interesting is how such exposure complicates who said what first. For instance what if someone says something on a simple website, someone reads it and decides to publish it as her/his idea in a book. Most people (even today) give the book a lot more credibility, and chances are that they will give the credit to the first that published the idea on the book because, as Andy says, that person did it first.

But that game is rapidly changing due to online activism...

Lawrence Lessig has written about about Intellectual property, and free culture. He does not say that things should be free as in "free" beer (to use his own words) but free as in freedom. His arguments rely largely on the Theory of Justice by John Rawls (although Lessig does not allude to him directly in the books I've read):


General Conception

All social primary goods - liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect - are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored.


Social Contract

John Locke: Free people need to agree on some ground rules in order to live together in harmony.


Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham: Act so as to maximize good (pleasure) in the aggregate.

Later twist: minimize pain. From either perspective, your actions are judged good or bad depending on the consequences they have for you and for others.

"The greatest good for the greatest number" can be abused, leading to the "tyranny of the majority" (e.g., Nazi Germany's mistreatment of the Jews and the United States' mistreatment of African Americans). Rawls' approach guards against this common source of injustice.


Intuitionism

Acknowledge a set of first principles to be subscribed to, but do not prescribe a priority ordering.


Good vs. Right

A person's good is that which is needed for the successful execution of a rational long-term plan of life given reasonably favorable circumstances.

• Liberty
• Opportunity
• Income
• Wealth
• Self-respect

"The good is the satisfaction of rational desire." (Section 15)

Each person has his or her own plan of life - what is good may vary. Right is set down in the social contract, the same for everyone, influenced by the "veil of ignorance." Rawls specializes the concept of something's being right as it being fair. (Section 18)



Although Lessig does not cite Rawls directly, at least in the two books I've read from him, his idea of a free market (where knowledge can/could/should be free) is largely supported by the principles laid out above. One thing that Lessig states about intellectual property is that when one shares knowledge, one does not lose what one knows, rather everyone benefits from sharing because then people are able to improve themselves and their cultures with that knowledge. The problem Lessig never really tackles directly in his books (especially in his book Free Culture) is how that knowledge is 1) evaluated based on who said it first, and 2) how that acknowledgment leads to actual monetary value, which is the reason why people are not willing to share what they know all the time. An example is the Discovery of AIDS. It was the French and the U.S. Americans who fought over intellectual property--not caring one bit for the fact that people were dying of AIDS. It was more important for scientific institutions to fight over the credit of a discovery than to inform people of a new desease and help them protect themselves, mainly from ignorance.

This is how that mess went down:

The Discovery of AIDS was equally discovered by Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier. Although Gallo has the credit here in the US, Montagnier has the credit in France. Accusations of Gallo stealing Montagnier's discovered have been questioned and left with the questioning of if they are true or not. Montagnier claims to have discovered all his information in 1983, the year before Gallo. The discoveries of the two scientists included who the disease affects, how you get it, and what it is. Not the mention the invention of Glaxo Welcome, the first anti drug for HIV and AIDS. View links for more information!

Oh... that site not official looking enough for ya? Hook the Wiki,
(leaves out the politics and does not mention the "naming controversy" as pivotal):
The AIDS epidemic was discovered June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (now classified as Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia) in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.[106] Originally dubbed GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, health authorities soon realized that nearly half of the people identified with the syndrome were not homosexual men. In 1982, the CDC introduced the term AIDS to describe the newly recognized syndrome.

In any case, intellectual property is quite complicated. It's not just about sharing but who gets credit for what, and how that turns into liquid capital. I understand that Lessig is just laying out a framework to make sure people get credit for their intellectual property. But how to make sure plagiarism does not happen is also part of the problem in "free" culture. And something that must also be dealt with more directly if "free" culture expects to make a dent in intellectual property laws.

And check the movie: And the Band Played on...

This film rendition of Randy Shilts's documentary book by the same name tells the scientific, political, and human story of the first five years of AIDS in the U.S.--roughly 1980-85. Mainly it is a story of dedicated medical researchers groping to understand the horrifying and mysterious new disease and simultaneously battling the public fear and indifference that prevented, during those Reagan years, both public funding of their research and acceptance of their findings.