While they bill the event as an Asian-American film showcase, don’t let that mislead you — Jon is an old-school, Hawiian, punk rock kind of guy — he’s all pop-culture, irreverent and often hysterical. Here’s the copy from the e-mail he snt out this morning:

In 1987 and 1989 — my first 2 extended stays in France — I was interested in mistaken identities — I was this black guy discovering both Jazz and Egypt in Paris. Literally.I haunted the Ethnographic exhibits at the Musee D’Orsay, the Musee de L’Homme and whatever weird, antiquated, quasi-American staples I could lay my hands on. I recall becoming obsessed with Sarah Bartmaan, Miles Davis and Josephine Baker. I think that they were my patron saints.

(I’ve got many, many pictures of Egyptian mummies in French and British museums from this period. [This Virtual Egypt thing makes more sense in words than in photographs. I have pictures of 'relics' that I created to complement the pyramid image.] It was in 1987.

I’m also reminded that I had this half-thought-out idea of constructing some sort of virtual Egypt, Kiefer-like, where I’d have pictures of this pyramid, alongside a number of relics I’d recovered from a dump nearby the rural American school I was living at, there in Southern France (Lacoste).

Funny, odd, etc. — looking back, it’s a screenwriter’s sensibility I was missing at this time, to wend all of this material together — if I had thought about this images as the leftover artifacts of a story, I would have been able to complete this piece 24 years ago.

After having been to Ghana, I’m struck by an alternate interpretation — all new concrete construction in West Africa looks like this — simultaneously a ruin and a constuction projecct. Projects like this can take decades, simply because people are willing and able to stretch their projects out for years, because their banks don’t do mortgages the way we do here.

Perhaps, I can find a small projects grant somewhere, to help me to pay for this project’s completion?

Hopper dead? Wow. Tangential as he was to Hollywood history in 1984, he was, at the time of Blue Velvet‘s success, one of the first re-stars — one of those actors whose first stab at success had expired after a lengthy run, only to see that career revived after an appearance in an indedendent project.

Yvonne DeCarlo, a screen-star of the 40′s and ’50′s was able to make that turn when she accepted the role of  Lily Munster on a weekly send-up of the Universal horror franchises. And Lily Munster was a mid-career role that occurred only after she’d already been in Hollywood for greater than 20 years.

Similarly, Hopper had come up in the studio system originally pegged as a competitor to James Dean’s marquee position, performing in numerous Westerns and illegal street-race movies well into the 60s; But by 1964 there was little interest in the Bobby-sox Hot Rod flicks and the country had shifted — college kids were doing drugs, young women were on the pill and a war was raging in Vietnam and progressive leaders were being shot int the streets. It was then that Hopper and Peter Fonda put Easy Rider (1969) after the 2 of them had spent the better part of a decade performing in the corporate version of the changing culuture — movie like Roger Corman’s
The Trip (1967), television and D-grade science-fiction like 1966′s Queen of Blood.

By 1979, Hopper had gotten something of a career bump from Francis Ford Coppola after appearing in Apocalyse Now, but that had been a result of typecasting himself as an avatar of the Boomer Generation’s experiments with sex, drugs and mortality. Come 1984, sex, drugs and mortality were exactly what David Lynch needed for Frank Booth — a shady underworld character who seemed to be moonlighting in retail matrimony.

1984 allowed Hopper to enjoy a second genesis in his career, a career that allowed him to become a major player among audiences after he’d already been in the business for 30 years and it didn’t seems as though he’d ever recover from sidekick roles.

Travolta is still praying for a career that might last for 50 years and allow him more than 200 roles.

Getting back from Ghana, I’ve been listening to a LOT of Fela recently. because of that article on Byrne and Eno — and how they comped much of the Talking Heads’ output from Fela’s Afrodisiac — really put me on a tear for hearing more of his music.

I can’t say that I’ve ever heard a more physical performer than Fela on Afrodisiac.The closest comparison I can render are those late-night Time-Warner Claaiscs commercials featuring James Brown weeping to “Please Please Please”, but unlike that American stuff, this is entirely upbeat, danceable music — the vocals transcend the song as they become an soulful plea yo participate in the music.

His horn solos — specifically his saxophone efforts — are as good as anyone in the Blue Note stables during the ’60′s and ’70′s. Fela’s tenor is sometimes Booker Ervin, sometimes Wayne Shorter with a good measure of either Jackie McLean or Dolphy thrown in. Like Tina Brooks before him, Fela has no problem playing in the upper register when other musicians would instinctively switch to an alto.

Fela’s rhythm sections are always a big, groovy thing, the likes of which ex-Verve and Impulse producer Creed Taylor tried to bottle when he formed CTI Records. But American jazz-fusion died because of Taylor’s desire to steer the music in the direction of the period’s most popular music:disco.

Afro-Beat had none of those commercial imperatives — the help of Tony Allen, Fela was able to bottle the kind of jazz fusion that New York could only have dreamed of. I suspect that the success of the Kuti/Allen version of jazz-fusion had something to do with the African polyrhythms and a cool appreciation for the Hammond G3 — something largely absent from the legendary CTI recordings of the ’70′s.

I found a whole pile of his stuff at the Library including a copy of the short 1983 documentary made about him by Jean-Jacques Flori and Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, ‘Music is the Weapon‘ aka ‘Musique au poing‘ (1982).

I now hear that there’s a Fela biopic due in 2011. I favor either Chiwetel Ejiofor or Jeffrey Wright in the title role unless Wesley Snipes has some additional gifts that he hasn’t shared with the world.

Info on the Kuti biopic:

Fela Kuti Biopic In The Works
Focus Features Developing Biopic On Fela Kuti
The Untitled Fela Kuti Biopic

Wow. I’ve been out of the art supply game for 7 or so years and look at how prices have gone up!

The price of photo-mount — once my weapon of choice, when I was doing super-fancy, surgical paper collages — has gone up a full 50%! I remember when the price hovered around $10 or $11. I’m sure framing people everywhere were pissed.

Charcoal? Vine charcoal, once the cheap-as-shit drawing medium that could once be had for $0.25 a branch now sells for 3x that amount and can be had in packages of four. Are real art students still using this crap? If so, they’re probably not paying 75 cents a branch for it — some money’s got to be left over for ramen noodles, someplace.

Anyway, I’m wondering how this awful economy has affected the art students of today and whether their number has withered since my school days…

So, now that my pal Mike has offerred me a show this Fall — arguably, to show off some of the many photos I took in Ghana — I’ve started to think about some Ghana-specific work that I might create to put into said show.

One of the most compelling things I saw and experienced during my visit were the castles at Cape Coast and Elmina. These were two of the BIG fortresses involved in shipping 90% of the American slave populations fron Africa to the Americas. It’s one thing to read about such things and another to see them — and not in some bullshit, Alex Haley Roots kind of way. It’s productive not only to visit the castles to see how the local English Governors lived, but also to visit the dungeons undernath the fortresses, below.

The fact of the matter is that in at least 2 of these fortresses, Cape Coast (English) and Elmina (Portuguese), the Europeans built their churches directly overtop of their slave-pits. And slave-pits they were — subterrarean cave networks, carved out of whatever stone it is that’s prevolent down there.

As I went on my tour of the place, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of congnitive dissonance the Europeans were indulging in to place their house of worship overtop their slave-pens, where likely they’d have to endure the sounds of their captives 24/7.

The floor in these tunnel-like rooms has been repaved successive times to accomodate for the blood and feces that inevitably crowded these spaces until they were waist-deep.

Hurrah, yet another triumph for Christianity and God-fearing supplicants everywhere!

But I’m thinking of creating some sort of sculpture to honor this stain of a place — perhaps an inverted church below some sort of large intestine, all hanging from the ceiling. That might be a start…

The rest of these photos are viewable here.

I remember I was in H.S. at GDS, when I remember one of my enthusiastic teachers going on about some kind of music someone was interested and how Fela could, “kick the shit out of that”. Granted, I was in H.S. at the time and likely jaded about anything anyone over 20 might have to say, but this teacher was one of the cool ones, so I took note.

And just last weekend, I read an article online in the Guardian, I read an interview with both Brian Eno and David Byrne, who were looking back on their earlier collaborations while promoting their new lp, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

As a jaded former new-wave art hipster, imagine my surprise when I read the following:

Byrne and Eno met for the first time in May 1977. Talking Heads were touring the UK as support to the Ramones, and John Cale took Eno to see the show in London. Afterwards, Eno invited Cale and Byrne back to his flat, where they sat and listened to records. Among the albums he put on was Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac (1973), which would become the template for Remain in Light. “I was very excited about this music at the time and they were pretty excited too,” says Eno, “which was thrilling, because no one in England was at all interested.”

Wow. Afrodisiac was the template for what both was and remains one of my favorite Talking Heads albums? I was listening to that way back in those same H.S. days, when I was either getting ready to paint or looking for insptiration. Born Under Punches always truck me as an entirely sublime composition from the fringe of Western culture somewhere, some techno-tribal place in the future somewhere, because it was.

Imagine my surprise at reading Eno’s comment, and then tracking down a copy of the OOP Fela compilation that includes both Afrodisiac (1973) and Open & Close (1972). And yeah, Born Under Punches shares a great deal with the first track on Afrodisiac, “Jeun Ko Ku”. Similar percussion, similar use of horns and keyboards and I dare say more interesting than the Eno and Byrne collaborations which were derived from it, down to the Talking Heads’ Eno-less Speking in Tongues (1983).

Fela Kuti – Jeun Ko Ku
Born Under Punches

Not only had I missed the boat all these years, but I guess Brne really liked Kuti, past the point of imitation… Not only that, Fela was a decade ahead of the abruni.

America’s new wave musicians were inspired by a Nigerian prophet. Who knew?