RegularJoan

wow! I love naked raygun and their teenage craziness shooting fireworks on Thanksgiving day! throb throb have you ever heard it?

@odradek once again the book is better than the film, sigh sob sigh! speaking of Saville, whom I adore, I don’t know if you’ve ever had the chance to see the series titled "closed contact", I believe it was also exhibited at Saatchi in London, but I found some photos online, for me her art reached the square of the circle there, going beyond the denunciation hyperrealism of canvases like "Strategy".

@Burns. I didn't know that Warhol had given that definition of "Videodrome"! @Pretazzo. It makes me connect that film to "A Clockwork Orange," the mechanism of media dictatorship that drives the protagonists of both films and influences their behaviors. It's a bit, in my opinion, as if Cronenberg had taken Kubrick's reasoning to the extreme, creating two split and intrinsic realities that condition each other. Crash is fantastic, try to get your hands on it; it's voyeurism at its purest, halfway between the visual shock of Andres Serrano's photographs (to stay within art) and the paintings of Jenny Saville. It's one of those films that manages to give Freudian sexual neuroses an urban setting. I hope that Ballard's novel (which I still need to read), from which it is adapted, lives up to it.

@ Fidia. I agree with what you said yesterday about art: it’s true, today, many artists, whether they focus on writing, music, or visual arts, struggle to create a universal language that can speak to people from all eras. Perhaps this is due to the fact that art, since the sixties, has begun to assume competencies that didn’t really fall within its scope and, when it made this choice, it failed to create an autonomous and structured language. But I think it was inevitable: once, culture was much more homogeneous and certain values and standards were shared by more or less everyone; then all of that fell apart, and art became subjective. Therefore, in my opinion, to define the genius or lack thereof of a person, just as with their artistic abilities, one should not look so much at the finished product of their creation, but rather at the very process used in that creation, the methods. It is for these reasons that I consider someone like Brian Eno, or Robert Wyatt (whom I know little about), Cabaret Voltaire, or even Suicide and Neubauten to be geniuses. This does not diminish my total adoration for the 80s new wave bands you mention.

I’m going off-topic.
Speaking of Kubrick: some time ago I enjoyed finding associations between the, if I may say, "grotesque" setting of "A Clockwork Orange" and the dreamlike and obsessive quality of "Videodrome" by David Cronenberg, one of my favorite directors....

Well... I guess I'll just rate the album. And then, Cale obeying like a schoolboy??? But one of the characteristics of the innovative sound of the Velvet Underground was precisely due to the presence of members with different musical backgrounds, who each contributed their unique touch! And I'm not the only one who thinks this... And then, hard rock?? Deep Purple? And to reduce the genius of John Cale to the silent obedience of a little schoolboy? But the "Black Angel's Death Song" you mention is precisely characterized by the combination of a fantastic and minimalist text, like Lou Reed, who studied creative writing at Syracuse, and the musical flair and innovation of John Cale?? Alright... I’ll get back to studying because June is approaching...

Maybe I’m about to write a big nonsense, but I think that Reznor's artistic gifts lie precisely in his ability to draw from these different inspirations and emerge with a personal synthesis, which is not so much visible, rather audible, in Pretty Hate Machine, where the sound of Ministry takes the lead, even if only partially, but rather in this album. In this sense, I see him as a true "expressionist" in music.

Yes!

@ Fidia: unfortunately, you are right, the bitter reality is this: art is an investment. Some time ago, a representative of lesser-known works came to my house: it's incredible how many truly deserving pieces were actually off the market because the public preferred to buy other types of productions, even if of lesser quality (according to, especially, the art representative)... anyway, a certain amount of social critique, in my opinion, existed also in classical works. Why then, were Michelangelo and his rebellious spirit, or Caravaggio, consistently rejected by the court of the Popes and the princes? Why did the Counter-Reformation censor certain artistic expressions that sought the liberation of man from medieval ethics?

pretazzo, aside from the fact that for me Trent Reznor is the Pollock of electronic music :)), I’m especially referring to pieces like "The Downward Spiral" or "Hurt"... there’s that underlying melody and, on top, the noises that are dropped in a chaotic yet calculated way: just like Pollock did when he unconsciously decided which direction to start letting the paint drip, and then, only later, allowed instinct to take over. Then, even (although I’m kind of losing it) there are songs like "I Do Not Want This" that, with their layers and layers of sounds piled on top of each other, remind me a bit of the torn posters from Rotella's paintings (oh god I'm losing it :D).