Boys will be Beastie, first interview, from Decline of Art magazine, 1981

Posted on | May 7, 2012 | No Comments

Adam Yauch’s death forces me to go back through dozens of boxes, to find relics of my high school history. The Beastie Boys’ first published interview was in my fanzine, Decline of Art, which Jill Cunniff and I put together in 1981. This interview was in the second issue and typifies our teenage-bricoleur-meets-PereUbu style.

The Beastie Boys were a hardcore band in 1981, Yauch plus Diamond but with John Berry on guitar and Kate Schellenbach on drums. Adam Horovitz had not yet joined. We were part of the same circle, kids in gifted-and-talented high schools running around NYC late at night. I took many photos of the band, as I did of any band we met or saw play, in this early stage. I am a little relieved I can’t take credit for that much of the writing… though as I read it, I feel the tone of the times: constraints of that times’ very grown-up TV and pop music scenes, the joy of being absurd and mixing things up that were part of hip hop the way it had to evolve before this digital era. The boss, Grandmaster Flash, and gigs by Treacherous Three at a basement reggae club, were just around the corner but punk was here (possibly just across the ocean… we were always asking British bands about the riots) and now. Looking back reminds me how totally confusing it all was, even in its midst. None of us knew what to make of it even as we created the scene, and as kids, we were not really supposed to be there.

As I go through the boxes, I am surprised again and again. Nostalgia has morphed everything things, and as I review the papers, they change again. For one thing, I am  having trouble believing we were that silly, but there it is, in black and white.

Boys will be Beastie, an interview from Decline of Art #2, 1981

Photos this side of layout by Robin Moore, c. 1981

Us: What kind of musical representation is evident in your music?
A: We don’t believe in music.
M: We only lift weights.
A: Off the record, my mother was a hamster.
Us: What do you think of N.Y. audiences compared to N.Y. audiences?
K: Well, I think — yeah.
M: Best in the world, because you can insult them yet they think they are being complimented.
K: My mother is in the Health and Racquet Club.
A: Hyper admonitory synthesism of monitory confusement within a statement.
Us: What is your favorite T.V. show?
A: Bill Boggs.
M: Phil Donohue.
K: Tom Snyder.
J: I hate my fucking self.
Us: What is your favorite restaurant?
K: La Rompa.
A: Uncle Wong.
M: Lord of the Chickens.
J: Enough embarrassment for one night. (John leaves)
Throughout the interview Adam and Kate were far too eager to write on Michael’s head and Michael was squirting Windex at my head.
Us: AACKH, DISGUSTING. What are your musical influences?
A: Pink Floyd.
K: Larry’s hair.
M: the Mills Brothers and The 4 Freshmen.
A: Off the record, my father smelled of elderberries.
M: Honestly, I am upset.
Us: Why, Michael, why are you upset?
M: Because I wish to abate this nonsense which is plaguing this society.
Us: What do you think of Crass’ ideas?
A: Los muchachos son mui stupido?
K: Das ist miene bruder.
M: Ta mere est le beurre.
Us: What do you think of Act II Haircutters?
K: Budgie rocks da house.*
Us: What do you think of these awful riots in N.Y.?
A: What?
Us: What is your favorite radio station?
A: Dub-ya Dub-ya….
M: WKRP in Cincinnati.
Us: That was really funny Michael.
K: WPAT, the place to relax.
A: My favorite color is red no blue.
K: Adam steals all his jokes from Monty Python. What time is it?
M: Marvy Marker.
A: Kate only said that because she loves Budgie because he kissed her.
Us: Do you like to carry on?
A: Yes.
K: The third OI compilation LP and they thank Noise the show on the back! **
A: Michael, you’re a dick. Stop that or I’ll chop your peny off and hang it from the tallest yardarm.
M: (Pollywog imitation) Are you going to see T.S.O.L. tonight? They’re from Boston! (by Michael with his shaved head, dancing madly).
A: I’m Big Bank and I’m the chief of the tribe that went down in the hall of fame.
(Adam lights up a three foot cigar)
Us: Do you remember when Brian Brain threw bananas at the audience?
A: And chicken.
M: No I remember I feel on my hootie on a banana peel afterwards when I was dancing afterwards.
(Michael continues to stick his fingers up his nose and talks to an imaginary John on the telephone.) I love you, I love you. I love you. I love you. I love youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.
A. Michael continues to babble on incoherently and continues to dance madly.

———————————————–

* Budgie was the drummer for Siouxie and the Banshees, who had just played in NY, and also featured in that same issue of Decline of Art with an even more nonsensical article but really first class photos by me.

**  Noise the Show was Tim Sommers’ radio show on NYU’s station. Two blessed hours a day, M-F, if I remember rightly, and the only place we heard the records we wanted to buy. The Beastie Boys had played a live gig on the show and a recording of that was circulated widely on cassette before their first EP, Pollywog Stew, came out on Rat Cage Records.

Happy New Year

Posted on | December 31, 2011 | No Comments

(It’s a noisemaker that a friend bought in a village in India during Diwali. Cost probably 5 cents. Handmade from discarded plastic tubing [perfectly clean] and foil stamping leftovers and other bits of trash. Because even with no money you can contribute to festivities in a grand way. LOVE!)

Trousseau

Posted on | July 20, 2011 | No Comments

My great grandmother Laura died at 103.5 but she still hadn’t lived long enough to use her best hankies.

I was shocked to find this pack of 3, pristine in their original package, in her home when we were doing the dead-woman-plunder. I get weak for anything white-on-white, for hand drawn type, and for embroidery of any sort. These are exquisite and I can sort of understand why she wouldn’t want to blow her nose in them. Perhaps they deserve framing, but they also need to be touched.

They are very, very dead. They’ve never lived — never been loved — only admired. This innocence, these handkerchiefs and handmaidens, must have been part of her trousseau from her first marriage. You can still see the pencil tracery that guided the needle on the purple one.

Great Grandma Laura didn’t break out this last set when she married, when she had a child, when she lost a child. She didn’t use them when her daughter married. She didn’t need their comfort when her husband died, leaving her with his business to run, or when her grandchildren were born. She didn’t cry into them any time when she remembered anything or listened to music. By the time she remarried, and certainly by the time her second husband died, Kleenex were “the thing.” Perhaps by then these orphans of her trousseau had been forgotten on a high shelf.

I wonder, what was she waiting for? Were they holy? Something the world shouldn’t sully? Did she admit that humans need to cry? (Not likely — she had a sort of empathy deficit).

Or was she just the most extreme “stuff” person ever?

More important… what am *I* going to do with them? Marjorie Merriweather Post framed one of her mother’s embroidered purses, and it wasn’t nearly this nice. Are these exquisite, labored on for hours (probably by Chinese children, then as now) antiques too good for my family’s boogers?

Great-grandma Laura: Etsy forebear

Posted on | March 17, 2011 | No Comments

Nothing was ever good enough for Grandma Laura. She had a sort of creative obsessive-compulsive disorder, a tinkering impulse that she’d take out on any object in her sight that was “straight out of the box.” Every plain sweater, every piece of ormolu porcelain, needed at least a dash of alteration to fit her ideas — every scrap of fine lace, every salesman’s sample of gimp, every leftover button represented the possibility that these bland objects the world was responsible for could be made right.

Looking back on it, it sounds like my Grandmother was the opposite of a Shaker: someone who embellished with a righteous zeal.

It’s not that she was sophisticated — she painted a single painting in her life, a bowl of perfect, perhaps wax, fruit in a brassy footed bowl, bourgeois with bossing, on black velvet. The frame was crazy gold baroque: a very respectable painting for a 50s New York apartment: that arrangement was DONE. The painting was formulaic and still without being peaceful, but it conveyed her restlessless and her satisfaction with her own handiwork. We looked idly at it while scampering to put on our winter coats, or while coming in to that ochre apartment redolent of homemade chicken stock.

It seemed to us, as artists in training, that there was no interest in process in the person who’d painted that still life (to us as to the Dutch, “still life” meant “dead”). It wasn’t about learning or getting better at something, or a skill at all: she needed a piece for that spot of hallway and so she’d made it. Simple.

Nothing fancy: Grandma’s creative impulse was irrepressible and endlessly inventive.

The pendant above is a perfect example. Sure, she glued a bunch of seashells and a scrap of coral (dead animal alert!) together to make a huge chunk of necklace that fit in perfectly in the 70s. The brass fish at bottom was plundered from some other less fortunate bauble, and bereft forever of beads or some smaller things that used to hang from its belly, now a series of empty wire eyes. And I am fairly sure that the hole at top through which the chain went was poked with an impatient pencil. But to give it substance, she built this monstrosity on a base consisting of an orange-brown prescription medicine bottle melted in the oven (on tinfoil). That crinkly edge is an organic reminder of that vital step: simulaneously “make do” and alchemy, trash transmuted into gold.

It’s hideous, of course, but you could buy hideous at any jewelry counter back then. This one, she MADE. I remember her showing off to us, before dinner one evening, a series of these, some of them using several bottles and no shells, organic looking, orange and brown and enormous. Each was more baroque than the last, and also broken: now it seems she foresaw just how much too far recycling could go.

Perhaps the enamel compact she converted to a locket (at left) is more timeless. (My family’s in that tight and dented box). The piece looks bound, contained, and therefore less frightening, but it didn’t occur to her to cut the photos in any way that would conceal her handiwork. Best of all, as a matte for the upper photo, she cut from an existing greeting card: look closely for traces of blue ball point cursive smudged behind thick layers of glue. (Her husband has been hastily added in on the lower panel, as if he’s a photo on the wall behind my mother and sister).

My sister and I took away different lessons and sensibilities from Grandma’s joyous overuse of Duco cement, which today you’d call “craft.” Her eye, her enthusiasm, her originality, I’d like to think we inherited.

But my grandmother’s crafts will never be surpassed — or even replicated — because her work was never about the finish: but about the DONE.

A very up-to-date clothespin doll

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

We were making clothespin dolls, using exquisite silk scraps from Grandma’s stash, and I was in charge of the tacky glue because no one has any newspaper anymore to lay down on the good table.

“Cut me a piece of this,” she said. “No! Bigger! And wrap it around it. Yeah, like that.”

“Even the head?”

“Yes!”

“But there’s so much extra….”

“Leave it!”

Sometimes your kid is a mystery. I thought the little drawn-on tip of a tongue depressor was a baby, to attach somewhere under the draping.

“It’s a microphone! Can’t you SEE it?” She rolled her eyes.

We stuck it on. Then hair. Ta da!

Who woulda thunk? Our Little-House-on-the-Prairie project had ended with the creation of Pink performing Glitter in the Air at the 2009 Grammy Awards. You can even see the wood through her robe.

(I’m very upset that this clip can’t be embedded. You MUST watch it!)

Great-Grandma Laura

Posted on | February 11, 2011 | 1 Comment

I think so much about my grandmother, Laura, these days. Here’s my email eulogy, from this time of year some years ago, but after Kevin.

Laura Glueck Kashins Reiburn, 5/13/1903 – 1/13/2007

My elderly grandmother is gone. Irene and I were to travel there Saturday to see her; but she was gone suddenly early that morning. My mother and sister were present. It was complications as it always is; it was relatively peaceful and I suppose they will call it natural causes.

I was trying to imagine what life was like when she was born. Since I always listen to Child’s Christmas in Wales multiple times over the holidays (still the season — our tree is still up) I could only think of his words — “before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse…”

I’d say something about that horse face except that we had identical profiles, you see, and cheekbones.

Grandma endured everything but had been truly unhappy for several years, since she had to have a live-in aide; she did not see it as keeping her from a nursing home; she saw it as keeping her from her life. As if age had nothing to do with it. She told me and Kevin once, describing how hard it was to convalesce after a broken hip at age 96: “Until now… I never thought of myself as “old.” I went around doing my everything without thinking about my age, just like I did when I was in my… seventies.” We of course could not laugh.

I did not think she would ever end. More than a rock, she was a boulder, and not one with a drop of water carving her away, either. Her force admitted no nature. Frail and hunched, but tall, with braces, a walker and the same shoes (“I have to buy them from this one catalog — you see I have a very narrow foot.” (It was EEEEE. Like someone running from a mouse.).) she pushed across the stained pea green rug with regard for nothing. She had been in the hospital for over a week for pneumonia — yes I’m aware it kills most seniors — but her lungs were improving steadily. So how could she die?

One day some years ago, but after Grandma was 100,  I was there when my mother was helping her pay bills. My mother saw the card for Grandma’s Newsweek subscription and said, “You checked off that you want to subscribe for TWO years.” Grandma said, “Yes, you save money that way.” My mother said, rolling her eyes only a little surreptitiously, “TWO YEARS?” “It’s cheaper.” “Are you sure you want TWO YEARS?” “What? I said it’s cheaper.” Grandma could not understand what the problem might be. I had been repeating this story carelessly this past year, and even this past week. I was not in a rush to get up to the city.

In 1999 she had some sort of brain aneurysm or whatever the opposite of that is. She suddenly lost the abiility to walk in the hall at her volunteer job at the Met and had to be taken to the E.R. They operated, there was little damage, and later she was given therapy for many months to learn how to walk again, etc. While she was in recovery at the rehab hospital they gave her all sorts of tests that were purely academic. They said they just didn’t get a subject that old very often and they were constantly amazed at her acuity — remember that they were also looking for brain damage. She was proud of the results and insisted that everyone there loved her.

At one point they had her see a psychiatrist. Later, my mother asked her how it went. We are sure she was unfamiliar with the mode we call “active listening” because she replied, “He was very nice. HE AGREED WITH EVERYTHING I SAID.”

So it seems impossible that it’s over. Who would expect a 103-(and a half)-year-old woman to be hospitalized from pneumonia and make a full recovery? Only everyone who knew her.

Your rainbow needs every color

Posted on | February 4, 2011 | No Comments

Photo of a green chalkboard with a child's drawing of a rainbow on it, in white chalk.

I bet you think this post is about multi-culturalism. It’s just about COLOR. Color, that most emotional, important, survival-linked quality, that doesn’t really exist and yet changes our every day. Color that’s used to mark special occasions, to set the tone in space and person. Color that even FOOD needs to be appetizing.

Color, really, for your corporate or non-profit’s identity online.

Most people pick colors for their corporate identities the same way they’d pick a sweater: what do *I like*?

Trust me: you’re nearly always gonna end up with blue. (Blue is the most popular color in the U.S.)

Which sends the powerful message…. That there’s nothing special about us or what we do. We want you to like us. We’re safe. Move right along, folks, nothing to look at here! Most organizations, even non profits, even those who are really uncomfortable with success, would like you to stick around to learn something else about you.

Color is considered a bearer of meaning in its own right — in addition to the words you include on your website, your organization’s name, and your programs. The colors you use can enhance your message — or detract from it.

So why not select from a real rainbow — one with a full range of choices?

Psychological and cultural associations for the rainbow
Here are the common meanings for many pure colors when they are used as a primary element in your corporate palette (using them as an accent doesn’t create as strong an emotional impression):

Red is for passion: love and anger. Red stimulates the senses and escalates feelings. Red is extreme, powerful, and risky. Red is the most visible color, so it’s used to get your attention. Our ancestors knew that red fruit was safe to eat, and to stay away from snakes with red marks. Red is core: the true color of every human’s body.

Pink is not really a separate color from “light red,” but it’s used so widely now, it deserves its own entry. It may be unfair to see pink as “girly,” (those associations were largely built after 1970) but organizations that use clean pinks will have trouble shedding that image. Pink can be sweet or cloying, sincere or disingenuous. Shades of pink from “Pepto-bismol” down to the  pastel shades can be tranquilizing. Brighter pinks like fuschia read as red, only more provocative, sometimes playful.

Orange stimulates the appetite. It’s happy, energetic, warm, and ambitious. Like the other secondary colors (green and purple), it tends to go in and out of fashion frequently and thus, has less stable meaning and associations to most of us.

Yellow is optimistic, it can increase metabolism, appetite, and concentration. Pure yellow should be used sparingly as it can be tiring to look at. Yellow stimulates serotonin.

Green is the color of health and healing. Associated with nature and prosperity, “green” is the only color name that’s currently used as a verb. Green rooms are used to calm people before they appear on TV, and in hospitals and schools.

Blue is the emotional opposite of red: calm, stable. It’s not only the most common choice, but also dominates our planet, evoking both sea and sky. Blues can stimulate productivity, but used in excess, they can be depressing. Blue is widely selected for corporate identities (think IBM) and easy for designers to use, but if your organization depends on people, you may not want to imply blue’s distance and coldness.

Purple was the color of royal robes because red and blue dyes are expensive and hard to use — the pigments don’t always mix well. Purple is rare and unappetizing. Because purple combines the two colors we feel the mostly strongly about — blue, the coldest, and red, the hottest — purple sends the ultimate “mixed message.” People who wear purple are demonstrating their confidence in who they are, but may be seen by others as artificial. This is true also for shades of pink that veer toward purple.

Brown is a very natural family of extremely varied colors. In general, browns are popular with men, and convey reliability and kindness. I tend to think of pure browns as “yucky” but I appreciate them when I seen them used in combination with other colors. Browns are unmatched for “mixing in” with other colors and modulating their intensity.

Black and white are not true colors, but are part of your palette. Black conveys power, white purity. Black and white are the colors whose meanings change the most from one culture to another. For example, while Americans associate black with death, Japanese think of white or purple. In China, foods that are green or black are considered the most healthy, a fact which has not been lost on Coca Cola. Black and white together are easy to understand (text should nearly always be black on a white background) and like browns, are necessary as admixtures to all the other colors, in order to give you a real and full rainbow.

Gray is black and white mixed, neither one thing, nor another. Using a gray as a central color shows that you are indecisive, but grays are incredibly useful and practical in small amounts. When used well, instead of putting you to sleep, grays imply solidity and timelessness.

Maybe this summary has made you hate every color: that might be enough to break you of your personal associations and help you see the bigger picture and pick what works best for a wide range of your stakeholders.

Next: Common color mistakes

Happy Solstice/Winter is Over (for and after Yoko Ono)

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | No Comments

“I’ve just about had enough of winter,” says everyone, it seems. But it just started today: solstice. The longest night. The spectacular eclipse, which everyone claims to have seen, just as everyone claims to have been at Woodstock.

The sixties are over, but for those who are ready for the end of this season, you can know: the days get longer from here on out, the nights get shorter. A minute a day. If I screamed from the rooftops, I’d say:

Come to think of it, a Bed-in sounds awfully nice right about now.

Mourning breakfast

Posted on | December 13, 2010 | No Comments

Breakfast was full of memories today. Rye toast, because Mike and I had deli for grown-ups-only dinner late last night. I knew he’d be happy to see rye bread with seeds, like what we had when I was a kid (except we never had a toaster), which I used to go buy at D’Aiuto’s on the corner. Kevin drew our Italian bakery, where we remembered our Jewish roots, in 2000 or so for Pierogi, for his New York “drawer show.” My neighborhood bakery, in pencil, varnished and perfect, graphite, soot relative. Now I can recognize kindred bakeshops by the tri-color cake/cookies covered in chocolate: bright cross sections showing green, yellow, and dark pink, tasting like some fake liqueurs perhaps, thoroughly obsolete cookies that wish to remind you of something that no one alive knows any more. These inferior petits-fours are less overtly “New York” than the brightly lit, rotating cake displays in better diners, but they are tastier, because those showgirl cakes are always watery, cornstarchy, and pointless, the chocolate not really chocolate, the almond topping crunchless, the Black Forest denuded at best. I don’t think those poseur cakes showed up until the 80s, or else the diners I grew up at weren’t dazzled enough to show them.

This rye bread, even though it’s from Pepperidge Farm, is a taste that remains real, even if the city’s been somewhat taken out of it: it’s a little dry, like it just got off a long train ride.

We might have had English muffins, but we were out. Last week I bought the first package of 6 in probably 17 years, and only because a promotion for some obscure brand was right next to the eggs. Little girl loved the muffins (I call her “muffin” a few times a day), and Mike had suggested them a few times as breakfast problems surfaced, but I wouldn’t have sought them out. “Crumpets” from the Korean market were what my father was bringing home the day he died. Then again, he had just eaten an ice cream cone, and that hasn’t stopped me from eating ice cream since 1993. Although, come to think of it, I have not been to Carvel all this time.

One of Dad’s best (worst? MOST FREQUENT.) “jokes” was: “Fee fi fo fum! I smell the blood of an English Muffin!”

This morning too I stared at the little red scoop with a long handle that comes in every coffee can. It’s hard to throw out something so perfect, and they can’t be recycled, but they’re not suited to use with kid paints or anything that comes to mind. I could make little Christmas ornaments, with a diorama in the scoop, piercing the handle with a hot knitting needle… and I know this is what my grandmother, Laura, would have done. She who made hideous but fashionable orange and brown organic swirly jewelry by putting prescription medicine bottles in the oven. She who always said “Duco cement!” if you commented on anything she was wearing, because she’d stuck an orphaned earring on top of a brooch, or a yarn ornament on each button on a blouse. She had a sort of creative OCD: it nagged her to leave anything unaltered.

I toss the scoops, knowing there is plenty to make ahead of me, glad to know my daughter likes the toast, even though seeds stick in her teeth. This stuff, after all, runs in the family.

Split/Level: 2 loves, 2 homes

Posted on | December 1, 2010 | 1 Comment

It’s a little freaky to walk into my prototypical 50′s split level house and see this silkscreen print of an almost-identical house over the fireplace. I imagined people would want to quickly run outside and check, or feel that they were in a Twilight Zone episode.

It’s spookier to know that the print was produced by my late husband, Kevin MacDonald, in his last year of life. That he loved this sort of house, in one of which I live with my second husband, and with my first husband’s child. And the 50s pottery. Kevin grew up in the 50s and the kitchen in our old house, the one we shared, had lovely postwar cabinets so we started to collect things that would complement it — in addition to the Harlequin china Kevin had been accumulating for 20-some-odd years.

All that stuff looks better in this house, though. The teak. The Harlequin. The Russell Wright.

In this house, where my second husband lived with his first wife and raised his two kids. This house, which didn’t really fit their overstuffed antiquey furniture very well. This house, which was built the year he was born.

Kevin would just have loved all of it — the second life, the ironic screen print, the house itself, our happiness. He would have laughed at some parts, sure. And he might not have approved of how I’ve decked the halls, or the white plastic tree, or the microwave… but it all works.