Showing posts with label 1960s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1960s. Show all posts
Summertime Blues covers
Hanson perform Summertime Blues live on Japanese TV, circa 2000!
The Who play Summertime Blues at the Montery Festival, 1967.
Van Halen perform Summertime Blues in 1983 in an Argentinian gig. They synth it up proper too. The song is totally transformed from rockabilly pop.
Stray Cats used to just rob every rocakbilly song going. (including C'mon Everybody). This is their Summertime version, 1983, live at The Palace in Hollywood.
Duffy borrows from the Temptations
I really like the above song, Warwick Avenue by Duffy, but there is no denying it has the same opening chords of the Temptations' My Girl. It's quite brazen really. And by quite I mean, you know, very. And by very brazen I mean, you know, plagiarism. But then Duffy is Welsh. Nice tune, and an even better video. Close up crying. Never fails.
Below I have posted the Temptations with My Girl to contrast and compare. Not just any video however. A live TV 1965 performance of the track in snazzy suits and black and white filters. Sweet.
Shangri-Las, the best girl group/group ever?
One of the best songs about mother/teenage daughter strife ever. A fucking brilliant breakdown after the 2 minute mark. Just amazing. Heartbreaking. Exemplary. "I'm gonna hide/if she don't leave me alone/I'm gonna run away/ - don't!", "Listen, does this sound familiar?/you wake up every morning/go to school every day/spend your nights on the corner/just passing the time away/your life is so lonely/like a child without a toy/then a miracle/ - a boy!", "I packed my clothes/and left home that night/though she begged me to stay/I was sure I was right/and you know something funny/I forgot that boy right away/instead I remember being tucked up in bed/and hearing my mother say/hush little baby, don't you cry".
Angelina Jolie as Lisa, Girl Interrupted
Watch the whole of the James Mangold-directed adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl, Interrupted (title taken from a Vermeer painting), written about the author's time spent in a psychiatric instiution in the early 1960s. The institute she stayed in as a 19 year old is the famous McLean Institute in Cambridge, the same place Sylvia Plath spent time in during the 1950s. This film won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Angelina Jolie (as Lisa), and was produced by its co-star, Winona Ryder. It's hit and miss but has good moments, brilliantly black humour and offers a good insight into the minds and moods of those suffering from mental ill health. However, it also bears the scares of a bullet-spray of cliché, & a scrappy plot, but then I guess those living in psychiatric institutions live scrappy lives (and, as mentioned, it is based on real life). A good 60s soundtrack featuring the one, the only, Petula Clark. Only thing I hated about the film and felt really let it down was the obvious 'magical negro' stereotype character (played, as ever, by Whoopi Goldberg). When will they learn?
Watch the whole film below in 13 parts, followed by 3 reviews from the Guardian newspaper. (None of which are sparkling to be honest. They were probably too wacked out on Xanax to make notes in the screening. Or ogling Angelina. One or the other).
Girl, Interrupted
The most interesting thing about Girl, Interrupted, a film version of Susanna Kaysen's memoir of her mental breakdown in the 1960s, is the provenance of the title. The picture begins with the narrator telling us: 'Maybe I was just crazy, or maybe it was the Sixties, or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted.' This is commonplace enough until one starts wondering precisely what 'a girl, interrupted' means. In fact, Kaysen's book explains that the title comes from an experience she had first as a teenager, then 16 years later, of looking quite differently at a painting by Vermeer in the Frick Collection, New York, called 'Girl Interrupted At Her Music'. Maybe they should have included this in the film.
The most interesting thing about Girl, Interrupted, a film version of Susanna Kaysen's memoir of her mental breakdown in the 1960s, is the provenance of the title. The picture begins with the narrator telling us: 'Maybe I was just crazy, or maybe it was the Sixties, or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted.' This is commonplace enough until one starts wondering precisely what 'a girl, interrupted' means. In fact, Kaysen's book explains that the title comes from an experience she had first as a teenager, then 16 years later, of looking quite differently at a painting by Vermeer in the Frick Collection, New York, called 'Girl Interrupted At Her Music'. Maybe they should have included this in the film.
Girl, Interrupted starts in 1967 with the central character being incarcerated and later turning the experience into literature. Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) is the adolescent daughter of a middle-class Boston family, and the institution - based on the same place Sylvia Plath stayed in the Fifties - is a mental hospital for the well-heeled.
Anyone familiar with Plath's The Bell Jar, Hannah Greene's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden or a dozen other books and films about suicidal middle-class girls committed to mental hospitals will find that this picture adds little to their knowledge. In a manner that would have satisfied R.D. Laing, Susanna's condition - 'borderline personality disorder' - is blamed largely on her overly solicitous, insensitive parents and their circle, and the heroine gains more insight into herself from associating with fellow inmates than from her therapy. 'Crazy is just you or me amplified,' she observes.
The institution, however, is a warm, huggy place with a lovable chief nurse (a beaming Whoopi Goldberg) and a fatherly Jewish shrink (bald, mustachioed Jeffrey Tabor). The connection with the Sixties ethos is underlined by casting as head of the hospital Vanessa Redgrave, star some 35 years ago of Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, one of the most Laingian pictures of the Swinging London era.
The best performance in the movie comes from Oscar-nominated Angelina Jolie as an aggressive sociopath, a dangerous charmer who stirs up the girls against their keepers the way Jack Nicholson does with his fellow patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and she too is zonked with ECT. The oddest aspect of the movie is the suggestion that the best form of therapy is watching The Wizard of Oz, which is certainly cheaper than spending hours on a psychiatrist's couch, and you can do it at home.
by Philip French, Sunday March 26th, 2000
Girl, Interrupted is a film about mental illness that arrives heavily dosed up on Prozac. This, it transpires, is a problem. Because, try as it might, this 60s-set tale of pretty girls with problems can never generate the rollercoaster peaks and troughs that one might associate with your average manic-depressive. It sticks throughout to the centre of the road, idles permanently at room temperature.
The clues are there from the outset, as Winona Ryder's pensive aspiring suicide is propelled through a tacky Graduate-style party before being ferried up the drive of an exclusive mental institution where Whoopi Goldberg stands waiting. In the last decade or so, Ms Goldberg (with her twinkly eyes and kindly smile) has become shorthand for a certain strain of MOR cinema, and her early introduction sends a reassuring message. No matter what trials lie in store, it says, the viewer can rest assured that they will never bite too deeply, disturb too greatly. Whoopi simply won't allow it.
Adapted from Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl, Interrupted plays out around the dormitories and recreation rooms of Claymoore hospital, a place where timid teens stroke plastic dollies, dance in the hallway and blub in the bedroom. Queen of the roost - a sort of Fonzy for the mentally unbalanced - is Angelina Jolie's sexy, feline sociopath, while the pillars of authority are represented, variously, by nurse Whoopi, head doctor Vanessa Redgrave and shrink Jeffrey Tambor (better known as Hank from The Larry Sanders Show). At times James Mangold's movie views like a St. Trinian's take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (several scenes - the pill-dispensing interlude and the wild lights-out party in the ward - look like direct steals from the Forman film). At others, Girl, Interrupted offers a roll-call of generic coming-of-age kicks, all underpinned by retro-60s stylistics (VW vans, bong-smoking hippies, the Doors turned up loud).
It's not that Girl, Interrupted is ever flat-out bad. The whole package is too polished for that, with its photogenic inhabitants (Ryder and the Oscar-nominated Jolie) and ballbearing-smooth direction. But as drama, as an insight into teen angst, it simply doesn't connect. The film is just too safe, too cosy, too conservative to draw you in the way it should.
Most crucially of all, Girl, Interrupted is fashioned around a fundamental error of judgement. Its inmates are cosseted debutantes from wealthy homes; its setting a Priory for spoilt brats. This isn't to say that that the rich don't have problems too, simply that it is that much harder to work up the required sympathy when they do. "This place is a fuckin' fascist torture chamber!" squawks Winona at one stage, but the viewer is more inclined to go along with Whoopi's view that our heroine is nothing more than "a lazy, self-indulgent little girl" who is making unnecessary problems for herself. In this way, Girl, Interrupted asks us to shed tears over these girls while simultaneously arguing that the only medicine they need is some tough love and a few homespun life-lessons. A dunk in a cold bath, a cuddle with Whoopi ("I'm sorry," sobs Winona), and they'll probably be enrolled in an Ivy League college by the fall.
by Xan Brooks, Friday March 24th, 2000
Winona Ryder is the star and co-executive producer of Girl, Interrupted, directed by James Mangold (Heavy, Cop Land), a film tremulous with self-importance. Throughout, Ryder is elfin-like, as if she is going to hop onto your palm any second and start emoting. She is Susanna, a troubled teen forced to check into a psychiatric hospital in 1967 after a suicide attempt. There she meets the statutory sub-Cuckoo's Nest line-up of weirdos and wackos, presided over by the ineffably smug and understanding female ward nurse Whoopi Goldberg.
The iron law of Prettiness-Apartheid applies. They are all uglies, plain-Janes, one of them actually having horrific burn-scars (just to emphasise the point), except for Winona and her co-star Angelina Jolie, the swaggering bad girl who has just been brought back after, of all the way-cool things, an escape attempt . Naturally, Winona and Angelina bond. But Winona never does any unsightly, unsexy things associated with genuine emotional or psychological disorder. It's the fatsos and the losers who do the arm-slashing and laxative-hoarding, while winsome Winona just scribbles sensitively in her notebook, sometimes writing in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS to emphasise that she does have a disorder of some sort. Otherwise, the bug-eyed, strangely sexless Winona might as well be a sensitive co-ed hunched on her bed after some sort of sorority hazing ritual. One for Channel 5.
by Peter Bradshaw, Friday March 24, 2000
David Bailey
Above, David Bailey's (1938-) photograph: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, from an exhibit entitled Box of Pin Ups, 1965.
Above, self portrait with Rudolf Nureyev.
Above, is Jane Birkin by David Bailey, March 1969.The Shangri-Las - Leader of the Pack
A live performance of their hit Leader of the Pack, by the Shangri-Las.
Rudolf Nureyev Dances Le Corsaire
Rudolf Nureyev is one of my favourite ballet dancers (and hot too). The above photograph shows just how beautiful (and extraordinarily well hung) he was. The photograph was taken by Richard Avedon, in Paris, July 15 1961.Look how perfect he performs an act of Le Corsaire. As well as the dancing, I love the aesthetics of this 1963 clip, the colour and feel to it.
A Bit o' the Dust
Great black and white photograph of Dusty, working the denim shirt. Probably the only person ever to have been able to work a denim shirt. Except for maybe Jake Gyllenhaal in
Dusty performs at the Hippodrome. Nevermind that her outfit clashes with the curtains. Notice how her head is perfectly positioned in front of the O, what I like to call, 'The vOgue Head' effect.
Wonderful TV performance of Dusty singing I Only Want to Be With You on Dutch television, 23/01/1964. The spotlight is the moon and Dusty is a star, against the blackness of the sticky-taped wired floor. Oh, it happens to be true, I only want to be with you, Dusty. (Best record of all time?)
The Beatles
The Beatles, random performance. Best for the hottie that is George Harrison in this picture.
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