So, let me get this straight, if I take LSD and heroin, I’ll play like Jimi Hendrix? Really?! I beg to differ. I guarantee there are guitarists down at Guitar Center without a record contract that are on LSD and heroin and will never make any money playing music. They’re putting that little theory to the test every day. I don’t buy it. I don’t care what you do, but I don’t see alcohol and drugs as being anything other than a way to make whatever problems you have in your life bigger. There’s not a problem in the world you can’t make bigger by drinking a fifth of whiskey. If it worked the other way, they would market it as “problem solving whiskey.” But I believe in personal freedom, and you should be able to do what you want, but you should understand that when you kill yourself with booze and drugs, I’m going to think you’re stupid. That’s just how it is.
—The Melvins’ Buzz Osborne talks about bands that were great and then blew it. In this particular instances he rebuffs the theory that it was the drugs that made Hendrix artistic.
Steve Jobs, along with whatever else we’re crediting to him, should be granted the patent on converting the universal human gesture for trying to remember something from looking above one’s head to fumbling in one’s pants pocket.
That stuffed bird is ultimately the reason “Canyon” is being donated at all. The presence of a bald eagle — a bird protected by federal laws — means that the work cannot be legally sold or traded. So when the Sonnabend children, Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem, inherited “Canyon,” five years ago, their appraisers valued it at zero. The I.R.S., however, insisted this masterwork was worth $65 million. It demanded they pay estate taxes of $29.2 million plus another $11.7 million in penalties.
As part of the settlement, the I.R.S. dropped the tax assessment; in exchange, the family was required to donate “Canyon” to a museum where it would be publicly exhibited and claim no tax deduction, Mr. Lerner said.
They made their coffee by mainlining espresso and having group sex all night before forgetting to ever get a job in the first place and hanging out naked in the sunshine at Golden Gate Park all day.
She simply chose not to notice that a bassoonist, trained classically in the 1960s, was not supposed to play art-rock, free-improv, 1930s cabaret music or Cool School jazz
—The Guardian remembers Lindsay Cooper, bassoonist with Henry Cow and Comus, among other projects. Her album Live at the Bastille with Maggie Nicols and Joëlle Léandre, is one of my favorite free improvisation records.
Raphael Montañez Ortiz performs one of his historic “Piano Destruction Concerts” on the Hirshhorn’s outdoor plaza as part of the opening night of “Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950.”
