disco-Beat-earring-holder_2785

One of my favorite genres of Kitsch is when objects are produced to take advantage of a massive trend in pop culture but actually have nothing at all to do with that trend.  My next favorite genre of Kitsch is when the products themselves are impractical for the use they were created to serve. This “Disco Beat” earring holder qualifies on both fronts! The bouncy,  clean cut 1950’s American Bandstand bobby-soxers would have never gotten into the 1970’s disco-beated Studio 54 and the zillion holes provided to dangle earrings from makes for too crowded of a surface to effectively hang more than a couple sets of earrings without them hanging over each other and coalescing into a tangled mess.  All of which makes for one hell of the fantastic Kitsch product!

I had my ears pierced when I was 16 but the pain was so excruciating I couldn’t get the image of a shaft of metal poking through flesh out of my head, reliving the experience every time I poked a cheap little gold wire through either hole. So I gave up after a few years and nothing has violated that area since. I did however have a great collection of  vintage earrings, none of which fit on the Disco Beat unless I had at least a half an hour to spend trying to disengage the earrings from the holes and each other.

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This “giant”(all 4 1/2” of it!) can of tooth powder was all the rage in the 1940’s and 50’s when the jingle, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!” flooded tv and radio waves. Pepsodent was famous for its powerful whitening ingredients, “I.M.P.” and Irium, but in 1994, then-FCC chairman Reed Hundt claimed that there was actually no Irium in the product at all. Despite this, the popular jingle and mere promise of whiter teeth made Pepsodent a huge success and the first product that used “radio as a medium for gathering listeners for the purpose of advertising to them”.

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Arrogance on the part of Lever Bros., the company that manufactured Pepsodent, actually stopped the tooth policing agent in its tracks. Confident that the non existent Irium insured its proliferation, the company was very slow to add fluoride to the formula. Other brands like Crest, Gleem and Colgate took over the market until Pepsodent was relegated to discount stores, bargain bins and buyers with terminal yellow teeth.

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But in its heyday decades earlier Pepsodent ruled, even included in popular song lyrics. From South Pacific: “Bloody Mary’s chewing betel nuts/ And she don’t use Pepsodent” (where’s the rhyme??). And in Cole Porter’s “You’re The Top”: “You’re the basic grand of a lady and a gent, You’re an old Dutch master, you’re Mrs. Astor, you’re Pepsodent.” (excellent rhyme).

1950’s commercial – See where the yellow went:

pepsodent-commercial
This “giant”(all 4 1/2” of it!) can of tooth powder was all the rage in the 1940’s and 50’s when the jingle, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!” flooded tv and radio waves. Pepsodent was famous for its powerful whitening ingredients, “I.M.P.” and Irium, but in1994, then-FCC chairman Reed Hundt claimed that there was actually no Irium in the product at all. Despite this, the popular jingle and mere promise of whiter teeth made Pepsodent the first product that used “radio as a medium for gathering listeners for the purpose of advertising to them”.
Arrogance on the part of Lever Bros., the company that manufactured Pepsodent, actually stopped the tooth policing agent in its tracks. Confident that the non existent Irium insured its proliferation, they were very slow to add fluoride to the formula. Other brands like Crest, Gleem and Colgate took over the market until Pepsodent was relegated to discount stores, bargain bins and buyers with terminal yellow teeth.
But in its heyday decades earlier Pepsodent ruled, even included in popular song lyrics. From South Pacific: “Bloody Mary’s chewing betel nuts/ And she don’t use Pepsodent” (where’s the rhyme??). And in Cole Porter’s “You’re The Top”: “You’re the basic grand of a lady and a gent, You’re an old Dutch master, you’re Mrs. Astor, you’re Pepsodent.” (excellent rhyme).
1950’s commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPsoxmXjtfc&feature=related

coldstone-butterscotchvelvet_cone-thumb-lgSwear to God, this week Coldstone introduced some of the cold stuff that turns into pudding and never melts. Only available through July 28th, this joint venture with the King of Kitsch foodstuffs, JELL-O, has the texture of pudding but is cold like ice cream and stuffed into cones or cups. Jello Pudding Ice Cream, as this test monkey is known, comes in Chocolate-y Goodness™ with peanut butter, caramel and fudge and Butterscotch Velvet™ with Butterfingers, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and caramel. I’ll miss the drips but look forward to even more chemicals lighting my system up. I’ll have some red balls Orbitz to wash that down with, please!

For recipes using the new chemical treat go here. Really.

grammy-winning-85 Winning the Grammy in 1986

Yesterday I wrote an open email to a widely read music industry newsletter re the longstanding mistreatment of songwriters in the entertainment industry, veering off into the music industry ignoring the Internet until it had almost swallowed them up. Today, Mark Cuban posted this on his Facebook page which led to it spreading virally. I’ve had so many people email me and send me Facebook messages today I decided to post what I wrote myself:

Hi,  Bob (Lefsetz). I’m Allee Willis.  Songs I’ve written include September, Boogie Wonderland, Neutron Dance, What Have I Done To Deserve This, the Friends theme and the Broadway musical, The Color Purple.   One of my earliest hits, Lead Me On by Maxine Nightengale, was co-written with David Lasley, who Andre Pessis talked about in his email to you.  We also wrote the first cover I ever got, Got You On My Mind, by Bonnie Raitt in 1974.  I’m weighing in because in 1981, after getting hundreds of songs cut in just a couple of years, I was the first songwriter who tried to unionize writers because of all that Ellen Shipley wrote about and more. I was also the first pop songwriter I know of to embrace the Internet  in 1991.  I started designing a collaborative social network in 1992 and, much of that time with my then partner, Mark Cuban, got laughed out of publishing and record company offices when we suggested they take the Internet and all digital technologies seriously.

The  songwriting union never got off the ground as much because of the ever-confusing work for hire issue as the fear many songwriters had of being blackballed. Our mistreatment wasn’t the dirty little secret of the music industry.  If it were a secret that at least would have been something. In reality, it was a non issue, not even a notch in the totem pole of consciousness.

I’ve written with and for hundreds of incredible artists and my songs have been at the top of the Pop, R&B, Jazz, Country, Dance and Alternative charts. I absolutely love writing songs and composing scores. But with success came an emptiness from the 1001 ways to screw a songwriter, long accepted as standard industry practice. This was coupled with a growing trend that if you were a songwriter who wrote for artists or producers other than yourself what you had to write to get records was progressively more homogenized. The dumbing down killed me even more than the screwing.

Other things that made me nuts (and thankfully led to a massive branching out of my career beyond songwriting):  A) Writing up to ten songs for someone and only seeing one or two make the album despite being told repeatedly you’re the only writer working with them. (Where there’s no payment there’s no accountability.)   B) Artists and producers sitting on songs for months and years until they had enough of them that the earliest songs felt old and they were cast out like a homeless kitten with one leg.  C) Giving away pieces of publishing and songwriting shares just to get cuts lest your spot be filled by a more de-spirited and desperate songwriter than yourself.  D) Settling for mere songwriting credit when your demo was used as the actual record – I was literally told by a major female artist that I didn’t deserve credit as a producer or arranger as  I was “only the songwriter and that’s what songwriters do”. E) Babysitting artists who had absolutely zero songwriting chops, doing whatever it took to keep your brain functioning as they deliberated whether an ‘a’ or ‘the’ was better for their already idiotic lyric. I’ve often said that unless you were the artist yourself, being a songwriter was like changing towels in the restroom, only difference being that the restroom attendant got paid.

Probably because many of my early cuts were with instrumental artists like Herbie Hancock and Weather Report or male bands like Earth Wind & Fire, coupled with the fact that to this day I don’t know how to read, notate or play music, it was falsely assumed I was just a lyricist. I was given tons of tracks to put words to. Oftentimes I would spend 18 hour days putting words to whole songs only to be told when I handed them in that only the choruses were going to be sung.  Is songwriters’ time so less valuable than anyone else’s that they can’t be told this when they’re given the track?

And then there’s movie soundtracks, where songs are sent out as temp tracks to be copied by other writers.  One of the last straws for me was when I received a copy of my own song, Neutron Dance, already out on a Pointer Sisters’ LP, and told to rip it off for Beverly Hills Cop.  After my co-writer, Danny Sembello, and I stewed for a couple of weeks we decided no one could rip us off better than ourselves.  We wrote a parallel song that mimicked the lyric – Neutron Dance’s “I don’t want to take it anymore, I’ll just stay here locked behind the door” became “I can’t stay here while I go nowhere” in the new song.  We slightly adjusted the drum track. We never heard anything after we submitted it – another standard practice after you’re hounded to hand something in.  Three weeks before the film was released we found out that only because Jerry Bruckheimer pulled a tape out of his wastebasket that his song screener had passed on and checked it to make sure he could tape over it did he hear our copy song, Stir It Up,  and insist it go into the soundtrack.  They never found a better song than Neutron Dance and that stayed in too.  Not only did I win a Grammy for Best Soundtrack but, in one of my favorite musical moments, I was named one of the most dangerous subversives living in the United States by the Communist government when they mistranslated the song as Neutron Bomb.

A decade later, in fairly infamous songwriting lore, two of the three producers of Friends, a full year after the song was a hit, demanded songwriter royalties because they had given me notes.  I don’t know very many composers who write for film or tv who don’t get notes from producers or directors.  By that point I was full throttle into my interactive career, building my prototype for willisville, my social network, and spending every dime on it that I earned from consulting for Microsoft, AOL, Silicon Graphics, Electronic Arts, Fox, Disney, Warner Bros. and Intel, who partially funded the prototype build (tho in reality I was stuck adding music and visuals to an excessively dorky technology they had already invested in). So I just gave in and watched my share of the Friends theme plummet because, as I heard it, these producers always wanted to be composers.  To add insult to injury, The Rembrandts never agreed to the song being released as a single as they resented not writing it by themselves so despite it being one of the biggest airplay records of the year singles income was nil.

In 2006, I had songs in three of the Top 10 films of the Year  – Babel , Happy Feet and Night At The Museum.  I didn’t know about any of them until I sat in the theater and heard them. Then it meant spending money to hire someone to track them down and to see if I’d been paid. Shouldn’t the songwriter, not to mention co-copyright owner, be informed and allowed to negotiate when their songs are used?

Currently, I have a theme to a hit VH-1 show that’s already run one season and is filming the next right now.  The production company still hasn’t submitted cue sheets to BMI for season one and the credits are so small and run so fast no one can even see my name which, I guess, isn’t a real problem as songwriting credits aren’t even listed.

Fate in the theater world is not much better.  Depending on the producer, composers and lyricists have little to no say about the way their music is arranged or mixed or how their show is promoted. Musicals take an average of five years to write so this can be especially heartbreaking.

The blessing of all of this was that very early on I was so unhappy I started to paint, soon after motorizing my art to my music.  This led to art directing tons of music videos for people like The Cars, Debbie Harry and Heart. I kept writing songs, still loving the actual act of songwriting, and also because my publishing deals helped finance each new field I went into.  But music publishers were not great at recognizing the value of multi-media careers.  Brain dead might be a more accurate description.  Despite selling close to 50,000,000 records my advances were numbifyingly low compared to writers who had much less success.   As opposed to thinking a broad artistic vision might actually enhance the contribution I could make my multi-medianess was looked at as a threat to the number of songs I could churn out. The exception to publishers wearing blinders (altho the low advances still persisted) was Kathleen Carey at Unicity (MCA), who hooked me up with Pet Shop Boys by selling their manager some of my art which led to me being hired to do their portrait.  During the sitting Neil Tennant put it together that I was the same A. Willis on some of his favorite records and we started writing WHIDTDT that night.  And also, Judy Stakee at Warner/ Chappell, who took my interest in digital technology seriously and introduced me to Mark Cuban in 1992.  Despite this, W/C would hear nothing of removing my song quota and letting me function as their Internet liaison, scoffing at my predictions that things like CDs and record stores would cease to exist and radio play would become irrelevant.  Anyone who cites Napster as the official beginning of the fall of the record industry still has their head in the sand.

These days I’m living my dream, finally singing my own songs for the first time since my one and only Epic album, Childstar, in 1974, integrating the songs with my art, videos and online worlds.  My first video,  It’s A Woman Thang, has close to 1,000,000 views with no promotion at all and was a winner in the Viral category of the 2008 Webbies.  The second one was featured on YouTube and won four W3 awards. The latest, Hey Jerrie, featuring me and a  91 year old female drummer on an oxygen tank, was the twelfth most popular video in the world on YouTube within 48 hours of its release a few months ago. These days, a least if I get screwed I’m screwing myself, which is ultimately more satisfying as I can always get a meeting with the person doing the screwing.  I’ve been toying with business models on the web for eighteen years.  I may not be rich from it yet but I’m rich as an artist with a larger and larger loyal following which, ultimately, is the greatest reward of all.

Reinvention was always easier for me than letting my personality and pride be clubbed out of me like a baby seal. I have a had a blessed life. I have watched myself go from battered songwriter grabbing at whatever crumbs were thrown my way to a strong, centered and fearless artist. I’m  a better songwriter now than I ever was.  I still have the same old bullshit befall me as a songwriter but I don’t stick around long enough to suffer.   It’s been a long, concious battle but as Celie says in The Color Purple, “I’m Here”. Very much here.  I thank the publishers and record industry for doing to us what Wall St. and the banking industry did for the American people – take such advantage and pay us so little regard that we’re stripped back to nothing, individuals who now have more chance than ever to do something spectacular on their own and change the world.

Allee Willis

canned-ham-front

Nothing better for a Sunday chew-down than a can o’ ham, glistening pink deliciousness especially when printed on tin or whatever metal this is that allowed the contents to completely disintegrate inside. As you can see from the photo below, the sardine-like key on the back is still intact but upon shaking nary a shred of meatstuff can be heard. I found this in a junkyard at least 25 years ago (the ham was already gone) and almost everyone who’s walked through my kitchen since gives it a good shake thinking the ham might magically appear.

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I hate that King with the big head. 

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He’s the scariest and most unappetizing mascot I’ve ever seen for a product, especially one that made my eyes spin when I first chomped down on a Whopper in 1967 and my life as a junk food junkie evolved to a higher plane than my permanently sugar infused cells could have ever imagined.  But every time since his/its birth that I’ve seen that massive plastic headed thing appear in a Burger King commercial I’ve vowed to never again let my choppers sink into the flame broiled meat festival I so love.  But now the King has taken meat to a new high and I just may have to bow and become a loyal subject once again.

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At 4 bucks a pop all the men you love can now smell like a sizzling burger. Behold the scent of seduction with FLAME body spray for men by BK. No lie!  I just ordered a case as this precious commodity of American ingenuity surely deserves an entire shelf in my beloved Soul Kitsch collection.  Though I’m sure I will part with a few bottles so the epidermis of those males I cherish most makes the air around us all even more fragrant.

I haven’t seen any photos that show the BK logo proudly gracing the newest item on the menu, but I certainly hope it’s pressed into the metal as proudly as a pickle chip sits atop its progenitor Whopper meat heap. Just as the American people have elected their first African American president, one who seems so wise, beneficent and level headed, I can only believe it’s the same strong faith, chutzpah and ingenuity in its inventors that led to a product so distinctly American as FLAME

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All hail The King!

OK. I reallllly should be writing a detailed blog about the party I threw last Thurs. night here at Willis Wonderland to launch the new Bubbles & Cheesecake video, “Editing Is Cool”, and to debut my first official painting collaboration with Bubbles the artist, the Print Painting series, featuring canvas prints of five of Bubbles’ most popular images that I hand embellished with paint and vintage found objects. That sounds pretty ho hum, a party to promote something, but anyone who knows me knows I’m a hostess with mucho mostess and stiff is at the north pole of oppositeness of what went on here.

In order to do this party justice I need to go through 14 hours of video footage and this is not a job to do when you’ve slept for 21 hours total the previous week and your brain mass is still dripping through a strainer trying to get back to any semblance of normal. So I’m slogging through all of it as fast as I can but know if I drive myself nuts to finish in the timely fashion bloggers are wont to do I won’t enjoy any of it. So please know that the merriment of the “Launching Allee” party is forthcoming – you can look at a few photos from it in the meantime – and instead this blog is about how I took my own advise as offered in my brand new shiny video, “Editing Is Cool”, and got through the party without killing someone.

An example of “Editing Is Cool” philosophy at work: It’s 102+° in LA all day/all night last Thursday. You know you’re a sweating and potentially smelly party hostess and that all your guests are equally uncomfortable other than when they hug you and you accidentally spill your drink on them which coincidentally cools them off. Your choice of psychological mental states is either I’m a sweaty, smelly, sloppy party hostess or the funky jungle is alive with wild sweaty natives and I’m the effervescent jungle captain. I EDITED out pathetic choice #1 and opted for #2.

For months now my server has been going nuts. Files get corrupted and disappear, the network is so constipated it crawls like a turtle with corns. All in the midst of me getting ready for this party – finishing the video, redesigning my website, making speed movies of the 23 hours of video I took documenting every second of creating the 45 paintings in the Print Paintings series, designing and printing signs, order forms, name tags, artist’s statements, bios, size charts of all the paintings, cards to hand out and that’s not even a quarter of the list. I’m working off of eleven different external drives as the ones on the server choke. I’m overwriting files faster than I can create them I’m so confused trying to keep track of where everything is. My internet access is fluttering on and off and the backup DLS goes down.

And through it all I’m still trying to figure out how to conceptually tie together everything I’m presenting at the party so the theme is cohesive – 45 new paintings, the first ever I’ve done by printing the image on canvas and embellishing on top of that as well as the first time Bubbles and I have openly collaborated on paintings. Plus a new video that happens to not only be my most ambitious work but one that more than anything I’ve ever created embodies my personal philosophy on Life. I cannot say I remained cool throughout the neverending cascade of technical disabilities but I didn’t lose it like I would have in the old days. I EDITED out that part of my personality that is exceedingly skilled at maintaining misery so that at least a few moments of peace pop through.

Which is good because the night before the party a bridge breaks in my mouth and I can’t open it without feeling like razors are dragging across my gums. So less than seven hours before 300 people knock at my door I have oral surgery. The anesthesia from which leaves me hallucinating all day as I work outside in the blasting, scorching sun with 25+ people in various degrees of non-readyness tweaking everything I turn on, hang up or create on the spot.

Then at 2 pm. the impossible happens. Someone forgets to shut the water off and the pool overflows and FLOODS the backyard. And then the pump breaks. And then the back-up pump breaks. So mere hours before show time one crew is filling up buckets while others stomp on every clean towel I have trying to soak up the water that’s saturated the grass as mud wrestling is not on the party agenda. It takes every ounce of mental strength to not go completely psychotic as all my red button panic issues have been fully engaged – medical emergencies, technical failures, flooding. But I remember that EDITING IS COOL so I take a deep breath and decide to move on to something easy like hanging paintings.

3 pm. One side of the yard is finally in shade so we bring half of the paintings out and start to hang them on palm trees all over the yard. But it is SO hot that all the objects I’ve glued on to them start sliding off. So we climb back up the palms, take them down and store them back inside. Which then makes it impossible to clean any of the rooms they’re stacked up in. I re-glue everything and keep repeating the mantra, “EDITING IS COOL”.

The heat continues to pound even as the sun goes down so we wait until the last possible minute to re-hang all 45 paintings. Less than half are up before the first guests arrive. This kind of stuff makes me CRAZY. I’m an efficiency freak and have been planning this schedule for months. How could this be happening?! But I know my options are complete hysteria = horrible party hostess or just hang on for dear life, plug whatever holes in the dyke you can and keep smiling. I EDIT out option #1.

But that’s when the real challenge begins. Starting four days before the party the air conditioning in the submarine where the servers are shuts off every 20 minutes turning the room into an instant inferno. Every millifiber of information re my life and career is on those servers. Fire is no good. Only two years old, this piece of shit Soleus unit was installed by a company that knew it was “overly sensitive” and constantly shut off but never told me or offered to do anything about it other than try and sell me a new unit when I finally confronted them. Oh, wait…. Bubbles is insisting I tell you that if Nicholas Aire Systems of Santa Clarita, CA. knocks don’t answer the door.

So the ac is going down every 20 minutes. That means 48 times a day multiplied by four days so please picture this process 192 times as you continue to read and remember to multiply that exponentially for how many times since then it’s happened until today when a new unit was finally installed by a new company for half the price. And don’t forget to factor in that I haven’t gotten more than 15 minutes of sequential sleep for 11 days now as I have to reset the Soleus shit box to keep it going for another 20. One hour before the party I call Nicholas of Nicholas Aire and say to him, “You know what’s involved in turning this unit back on and know I have to do it every 20 minutes and you’re telling me this is what I have to do while the I’m hosting a party that’s introducing some of the most important work I’ve ever done in my career?!” He says, “yes”.

So here’s the drill: First I have to pull out two racks of equipment that each weigh over 1000 lbs. in order to get a clear shot at the sensor button on the Soleus with the remote. After five or or six body bending tries – the room is only four feet wide – the hot air spitting unit shuts off. Then I have to carry a 25 foot ladder to the front of the house, CLIMB UP ON THE ROOF, pull this scary looking electrical thing out of this scary looking black box, hang out on the roof in the blasting sun or dewy moon for 5 minutes before thrusting it back in, climb back down (more scary than going up), return the 25 foot ladder to the backyard so as not to provide incentive for anyone wishing to break into the house, race back inside and down the stairs, body bend again to turn the unit back on and wait in the inferno for 5 minutes to see if cold air actually kicks in. Then I have 15 minutes until it all begins again.

It’s ten minutes until the party starts. This Nicholas guy has made me miserable for months, ever since I found out he knew he installed a unit that wasn’t fit for the job it was supposed to do. When “the best he can do” is send someone out in the morning and I’m stuck hiring a party guest to sit at the side of my house and race up on the roof every 20 minutes I tell him where to stick it and feel completely liberated. Now I’m in a great mood because I’ve EDITED the Nicholas out of my life!

Jerks must be EDITED from your life. Calamity must be EDITED from your life. It gets easier every time you make a cut. Exercise your power and EDIT your life. Because EDITING IS COOL.