The Flaming Lips - Live.
The Flaming Lips live show is all confetti, mirrorballs and rabbit suits. The stage is a collage of corny moments and phoney props. The band lined up in a flat hierarchy flanked by troups of dancing animal suited. A screen behind that shows mini-films and close ups of front man Wayne Coyne from a mike mounted camera as he waggles puppets, cracks blood pellets and puts himself through the mangle of entertainment. Giant sized coloured balloons bounce off the audience and around the Apollo with slo-mo physics. None of this would look out of place on Top of the Pops circa 1979, but there's an intensity that transforms it, like John Donne backed by Legs & Co. Dry ice engulfs the stage till you can't see anything but a big fog, cut through by torch beams waved like kids in a forest. The furry animals emote like a mascot school reunion. Their show transforms hollow stage gestures - balloons pregnant with meaning and Mexican waves profound. Like the Teletubbies scripted by Becket and directed by Sergio Leone its an off kilter cuteness, peaking with Wayne singing Happy Birthday to people in the audience (Joe, Katie, Vicki, Tim, Katherine and Christina tonight). Its like Dada doing Disney Character breakfast birthdays. And perhaps they were never meant to be so different. After all, Walt hired Dali to make "Destino" : "the first motion picture of the Never Seen Before" (shelved in 1947, post huminously completed 2003, DVD release 2004). Most art is made by excluding everything else in the hope that such severe editing will bestow some kind of concentrated power. The Lips music is made in the opposite way: out of piles of other stuff. Its a fermenting hooch of American Folk music - country schmaltz, hip hop beats, Detroit techno squelches, blues guitars. acid rock amongst others that give off a hazy fume, distorting sound like a aural mirage. An interstellar folk music. The Lips make songs that sound like they have fallen apart and have been carefully reconstructed - so that they are also lumps of sound stuck to each other. Their 1997 album Zaireeka explored this idea of music as sound assemblage. Released as four CDs designed to be heard simultaneously by lining up 4 CD players and sprinting around the room pressing play. The bands recordings were an approximation of what the listener would hear. The amateurish/provisional not-quite-resolvedness is part of their unique sound. It amplifies emotion. Coynes cracked vocals are like looking at a faint star from the corner of your eye. You can hear it in the shows big finale, 'Do You Realise': like the Six Million Dollar Man in bionic mode, slowing down makes it feel faster. The Lips make squewed pop music. Their view is slanted in a way which reclaims kitsch and pop from those who dismiss it as a dead end. The Lips show that a magic realist pop can be deep, tragic and optimistic. A soundtrack to inexpressible human experiences: the delight of sunbeams, the primordial wonder of existence, the mystery of death. It is an aesthetic at once emotionally raw and warmly cuddly - brutalism draped in fairy lights. An avant guarde that wants us to love each other. This is what pop architecture could have become if Robert Venturi had blown his Yale Prof $$$'s on heroin and acid in a Las Vegas motel - a psychedelic difficult whole. Or if Madelon Vriesendorp was the architectural guru her ex-husband became. Her Delirious New York pictures ( e.g.: Empire State and Chrysler buildings sprawled post-coitally with a limp Goodyear blimp condom discarded on a Manhattan grid rug) share an atmosphere with Wayne Coynes own paintings - a spooky kind of naive allegorical fantasy. The Americana which clutters the Venturis home (drive-in McDonalds signs in the hall, papier mache orange cactus, giant sized ketchup bottle ...) are just the kind of thing that the Lips sing about on Fibre Optic Jesus - a backstage gift from Jack White. The song is a tribute to the mystery and poetry of novelty plastic products. A secular tribute to the metaphysical properties of pound store artifice. That the whole universe is an illusion. That beauty can (and should) be found anywhere in it - especially things that somebody has tried so hard to make beautiful. Wayne's end of show each-day-at-a-time self-help-esque soliloquy is about the individuals responsibility to make themselves happy. And I think that is why all these lovely things are arranged haphazardly over the stage. They prompt our own efforts to be happy. It is a victory of poetry over taste. Of not wanting to be cool but trying to be human. It makes taste makers like Radiohead, Conran, or Adjaye look like petty minded parochialists. The best way to overcome the oppression of taste is to love more. The Flaming Lips pluralistically incorporate the incompatible by refusing to believe in opposites. By making lateral connections between distant things they generate a magnetic-like force that holds it all together and vibrates with possibility. First Published in IconIt ends with White Christmas, sung through a megaphone. It sounds a hundred years away, from the loneliest place on earth. It looks like a Muppet Velvet Underground singing the hits of Bing Crosby splattered with blood and punching the air while clutching a flapping mechanical bird. And that cheesy seasonal standard has never sounded quite so beautifully strange.
Posted by anothersam at May 16, 2004 9:56 PM.
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More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
The Best New Building In London
Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
Obscure Design Typologies: Life Guard Chairs
Osama bin Laden Cigarette Lighter: Novelty Products as Congealed Culture
Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
Now Showing: Dan Grahams 'Rock My Religion'
This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
Philadelphias Floating Architecture
Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
Viva Sectional Cinematography!
Now Showing: The Installation of an Irreversible Axis on a Dynamic Timeline
Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
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Form Follows Felony: The Secret Home of the Un-Dead Canoeist.
Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
Chapters for an Imaginary Book About Architecture
Shrouded Plinth - Urban Striptease
In the Night Garden - Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
The Marc Bolan Memorial Crash Barrier.
Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
In Search of Britains Vehicular History
Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
I Like Your Manifesto, Lets Put it to the Test-o
How to Become a Famous Architect
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Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
The Most Visited Location in the UK
Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
'Its beauty will know no season'
2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
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The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
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Football Pitch: Best of British
The First Cut is the Cheapest - Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
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The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
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Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
Langlands & Bell - The House of Osama Bin Laden
Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
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Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
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