SOME OF THE CORPSES ARE AMUSING While walking through MOMA en route to the Exhibit of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth publications, I recalled another USCO collaboration in which USCO artist Judy Stern and I collaborated on a silk-screen on an aluminized mylar version of the poster I created for the Monkee's movie, HEAD. The poster is is usually on display at the museum. The original b&w poster, the basis of a national ad campagn by Columbia Pictures, had nothing to do with my own head. (But then, neither did the movie). It was based on the cropped photograph of the screen of a television set in the Columbia studios in Burbank on which the one-minute version of the silent movie trailer of my head was playing. In the mylar version, the viewer sees his or her own head reflected while looking at the silk-screened image. Same also on the record album cover I designed using mylar. The press missed the point; but the art world certainly got it. I searched the MOMA site for a link to the poster to no avail, but after clicking on several external links I came across a website called Some of the Corpses Are Amusing, in which somebody obviously put in an extraordinary amount of time presenting a very detailed report on a movie made 43 years ago. It's more than anyone can possibly ever want to know about the movie HEAD or my role in it. HEAD, by the way, was the first of six movies produced by Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner (BBS Productions), a company that was also a community that also included Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda. Even me. Their second movie, Easy Rider changed Hollywood forever. Other films included Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. (The entire collection along with a documentary was just issued in a boxed set.) "There was a lot of work put into the HEAD piece on their website," wrote one of the Hollywood people involved in making the movie, "not flattering or accurate sometimes, but detailed. Stuff I either didn't know or forgot (hard to distinguish these days). As regards their reporting on my role, detailed as it is, it's not what happened. And don't even try to guess. Only a handful of people know the real story and no one is about to tell it ... yet. Toward the late 60s, the Monkees, through their TV show, records, merchandise, were the biggest act in show business. At the time I was told they were bigger than The Beatles and Elvis combined. The story behind my involvement in HEAD is not about celebrity culture, music or art. It is a fascinating story about business.. As Gregory Bateson used to point out, the map is not the territory, the thing is not the thing, and in this case, my head is not ... But give the Corpse crowd credit for effort, and applause for pointing to the seminal role USCO played in the set of ideas Stewart Brand and I have been talking about for years. Brand's main USCO connection was the engaging and charismatiic artist Steve Durkee, who left USCO around 1968 and today is known as Shaykh Abdullah Nooruddeen Durkee, a Muslim scholar, thinker, author, and translator. I frequently collaborated with the Beat poet Gerd Stern. Below are photos of the Shaykh (May 2007) and Stern (1980). For more on this scene, download Gerd Stern's oral history, compiled and archived by UC-Berkeley: "From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948-1978"
Enjoy. ... |
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher |
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