Indeed, Smith is scarcely easier to characterize, let alone explain, than he was when Mekas took up his cause in the mid-1960s. Before they made Harry (to steal a joke), they broke the mold. 12, a sixty-six-minute series of animated hieroglyphs that suggests a vaudeville Jules Verne version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead as enacted by a cast of dismembered Victorian valentines and cutout figures from a nineteenth-century Sears, Roebuck catalog-are the products of a one-man counterculture. The impossibly labor-intensive handmade animations that Mekas found so extraordinary-in particular No. The headline for the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter’s review of the Whitney show identified Smith as a “shaman,” and Szwed describes the tiny basement apartment in the Bronx where Smith lived in the early 1950s as something like the original hippie crash pad-“an atelier with DayGlo paint and black lights, ‘alchemical’ substances bubbling on the stove.” More general inspiration may be found in his abiding interest in Native Americans, arcane spiritual knowledge, and fondness for hallucinogenic drugs. Less known are the homemade light shows Smith contrived circa 1950 for a San Francisco jazz club. Mead.Īt once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Smith anticipated and even invented important elements of the Sixties counterculture, most obviously with his idiosyncratic six- LP Anthology of American Folk Music, issued by Folkways Records in 1952, which provided a basis for the folk music revival of the early 1960s. The title, a phrase sometimes used by Smith, comes from a book on gnostic texts by the British theosophist G.R.S. His centennial was marked by two firsts: the publication of the first biography on him, John Szwed’s Cosmic Scholar, was complemented by “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten,” a half-floor exhibition of films, paintings, and artifacts at the Whitney Museum, the first major museum show devoted to his work. Harry Everett Smith, who died at age sixty-eight in 1991, has officially arrived. “I don’t know how I managed to make him show his films.” Smith is “very brilliant, very learned,” Mekas noted in his diary, but also “crazy, evil, nasty,” and even abusive. Harry Smith was a new film genius to support, albeit a difficult one. A tireless apostle of the movement he named the New American Cinema, Mekas had devoted much of 1963 to promoting Jack Smith (no relation), whose banned Flaming Creatures became a cause célèbre, then a good deal of 1964 to extolling Andy Warhol’s switch from Pop Art to underground movies. Some even said that he had left this planet long ago-the last alchemist of the Western world.” This hyperbole is bizarre but unsurprising. “For years,” Mekas wrote, Smith had been “a black and ominous legend and a source of strange rumors. 60 on the Billboard 200.“Does Harry Smith really exist?” So the writer and filmmaker Jonas Mekas began his March 18, 1965, column for The Village Voice. It was recorded on February 13 and 14, 1970, and offers concert highlights from the show at the Fillmore East in New York City. The live album by the band was released in July of 1973 on Warner Bros. History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear’s Choice) That amounts to more than 5,000,000 doses. By his own account, he produced at least 500 grams between 19. He was reportedly the first known private person to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. He also helped develop the group’s “wall of sound.” Many in the media called him the Acid King. He was the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead and recorded many of the group’s live performances. Said Bear of the bears, “the bears on the album cover are not really ‘dancing.’ I don’t know why people think they are their positions are quite obviously those of a high-stepping march.”Īn American-Australian audio engineer, “Bear” was a key figure in the Bay Area hippie movement in the ’60s. The bears themselves are a reference to Owsley “Bear” Stanley, who recorded and produced the album upon which they appear. Thomas said that he based the depictions on a lead sort, which is a block with a typographic character etched on it, from an unknown font. Drawn by Bob Thomas as part of the back cover for the band’s 1973 album, History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear’s Choice), the “dancing” bears may not even be dancing at all.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |