I was sad to learn of Paul Allen’s passing today.
We visited the Experience Music Project (MoPop) several times in Seattle in past years. Paul Allen’s affinity and love for Jimi Hendrix was always evident.
I know they’re jamming in heaven right now.
Excuse them while they kiss the sky!
Pearl Jam: Home and Away – MoPOP Museum, Seattle, WA
Get a first-hand look at Pearl Jam’s journey from 1990 to the present and into the future through more than 200 artifacts directly from Pearl Jam band members and their Seattle warehouse, including instruments, stage props, original art, and a photo op featuring the towering letters from the front of Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten.
The exhibition opens Saturday, August 11 and is included with your MoPOP general admission.
Pop culture is global, national, and regional. Our favorite pop culture museum is MoPOP (Museum of Pop Culture) in Seattle, Washington. It started as the Experience Music Project then it grew a second half that featured a Sci-Fi museum. It merged into the MoPOP Museum. You take the monorail from downtown Seattle to visit this experience.
Oklahoma has now launched a pop museum project called OKPOP. The Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture, which will be located in the Tulsa Arts District, will be a museum dedicated to the creative spirit of Oklahoma’s people and the influence of those artists on popular culture around the world. Stories featured in the museum will include movies, radio, television, illustration, literature, theater, Wild West Shows and Route 66— all connected to a sense of time and place through the language of music.
OKPOP is dedicated to telling the story of the creativity of Oklahoma’s people and their influence on the popular culture around the world. The OKPOP staff is actively collecting artifacts, photographs, archival materials, film, video and audio recordings that represent Oklahoma’s creative
history.
Some of the famous Oklahomans OKPOP will feature include Will Rogers, Bob Wills, Joan Crawford, Gene Autry, Leon Russell, Reba McEntire, S. E. Hinton, Garth Brooks, Wes Studi, Alfre Woodard, James Marsden, Carrie Underwood and Kristin Chenoweth, among countless others.
OKPOP is anticipated to open in 2020.
Legendary Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart is performing in a unique program at the American Museum of Natural History on Friday April 13th/Saturday April 14th in New York City.
The evening begins with a walk-through of the special exhibition Our Senses: An Immersive Experience featuring a curated soundscape based on Hart’s recently released album, RAMU.
Then Hart will be in the Hayden Planetarium Dome for an electrifying live performance of Musica Universalis, created in collaboration with the Museum’s Director of Astrovisualization, Carter Emmart. The show will be followed by a discussion with neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and Our Senses Curator Rob DeSalle.
This Pink Floyd book is the closest I will get to the Pink Floyd Museum Exhibit.
I am hoping that New York City will be the next museum tour stop. The curator hasn’t announced where in the world this exhibit will appear next but my fingers are crossed.
A couple of weeks ago we attended the “It’s Alive” exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
There are 100+ items on display curated from Kirk Hammett of Metallica’s private collection.
Like Kirk, I grew up as an early teen reading everything I could find about horror and sci-fi movies. The definitive information source in the early 60’s were the Famous Monsters of Filmland and Spacemen magazines which I would buy at the local variety store.
Forrest J. Ackerman(Forry) was our monster movie subject matter authority. He was Editor for Famous Monsters/Spacemen. He had an extensive memorabilia archive of 36,000+ items at his three Ackermansions. I learned a great deal from his authoritative articles that highlighted rare movie stills from such classics as King Kong, Bride of Frankenstein, and Dracula. His favorite sci-fi movie that he turned me on to was Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927).
I collect music posters and they adorn many walls in my house. I gained a deeper appreciation for the rare movie posters in Kirk’s collection as an art form. Many of the posters on display were from Universal Pictures. I never fathomed how many movies Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi had made either individually or in collaboration.
If I had to choose one poster that enchanted me most it was the French movie poster of Frankenstein (1931) with the rare graveyard scene.
I deeply thank Kirk Hammett for sharing his private collection with the public. I also want to thank Peabody Essex Museum for the fantastic exhibition. It brought back many deep-seated memories seeing the Universal Movie posters, lobby cards and giant green Space Invader from Mars alien.
It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection is on view until November 26.
BAMPFA, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley. This exhibition is part of San Francisco’s 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love.
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia – Through May 21, 2017
This major exhibition is the first comprehensive exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and its impact on global art, architecture, and design. It presents an extraordinary array of works—many of which have been added for the Berkeley presentation—including experimental furniture, immersive environments, media installations, alternative magazines and books, printed ephemera, and films that convey the social, cultural, and political ferment of this transformative period, when radical experiments challenged convention, overturned traditional hierarchies, and advanced new communal ways of living and working. In the art, architecture, and design of the counterculture one can see early stirrings of the tech revolution and ecological consciousness, as well as powerful expressions of the wish for peace and social justice.
The Cockettes, a flamboyant ensemble of hippies, gay, straight, and undecided, decked themselves out in gender-bending drag and tons of glitter for a series of legendary midnight musicals at the Palace Theater in North Beach.
The Cockettes were born on stage, New Year’s Eve, 1969. The collective passion was to take every fantasy, desire, idol and dream and in the most joyously flamboyant way possible, put it onto the stage.
Founded by Hibiscus (real name, George Harris, Jr.) the troupe performed outrageous parodies of show tunes (or original tunes in the same vein) and gained an underground cult following that eventually led to mainstream exposure. With titles like Gone With the Showboat to Oklahoma, Hell’s Harlots and Pearls over Shanghai, these all singing, all dancing extravaganzas featured elaborate costumes, rebellious sexuality, and exuberant chaos.
The Cockettes were soon heralded as the cutting edge of Freak Theatre appearing in Rolling Stone, Paris Match and even Playboy magazines. They attracted admiration from Diana Vreeland, John Lennon and Marlene Dietrich, among others. Truman Capote and Rex Reed attended a San Francisco performance of Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma, and Reed wrote a glowing review calling it “a landmark in the history of new, liberated theater…”
Some members of the general public don’t believe musicians have the right to protest. They just want them to play the music and shut up about politics. Yet any fan can protest should they so choose. Wrong double standard if you ask me.
The protest movement rose out of song and the right to assemble. This exhibit highlights that basic human right.
Check out the Newseum Website for more particulars. Wish I could see this exhibition.
I received an email this morning. It contained an invitation from Congressman John Lewis via the White House. I was invited to virtually attend the opening ceremony of the National Museum of African American History and Culture today at 10:00 am ET.
I was thankful for that invite as I got to witness the celebration of a vital 100 year project come to fruition on the National Mall.
There were wonderful speeches and presentations.
My favorite moment was Stevie Wonder’s words and the question he had for us to contemplate, “Where is our Love Song?”
With all that’s been going on in Charlotte the symbolism of promoting unity through the opening of this museum was not lost in the music of my heart.
There are various locales that represent important music genres in the United States. I’ve been fortunate to visit New York City (infamous for Jazz), Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee (representing the Blues).
I recently wrote about the National Blues Museum in St. Louis being another step in the music journey.
I have discovered another vital American music museum to see, the San Francisco Music Hall of Fame. SF Music Hall of Fame showcases artifacts and memorabilia from San Francisco’s rich and storied musical history, offering visitors a fun and informative look back at the sounds that shaped The City and how The City shaped the country. Rotating exhibits across two floors will offer people of all ages a glimpse into the San Francisco Sound.
The San Francisco Music Hall of Fame is in the design stage and will offer a stroll through the history of some of the most influential music of our time. In the halls of Music City you’ll revisit the San Francisco Sound, the Summer of Love, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly Stone, Santana, Janis Joplin, and so much more.
Classic photography, concert-played instruments, vintage posters, and an ever-changing display of memorabilia is blended with modern interpretations of the music of the Bay Area to bring you a glimpse like no other into the classic rock era.
Installed in the sidewalk in front of Music City SF at 1353 Bush Street, over 330 intricately connected, engraved bricks, embedded in the sidewalk of the Music City SF building, honors local legends, including many who may never received national recognition, for their place in the rich, diverse and creative musical and cultural movements of the San Francisco Scene.
The Music City SF Walk of Fame celebrates the personalities, places and events that make up the community heritage of The City and the SF Bay Area. From Beat Poets to the San Francisco Sound explosion of the late 1960’s to the artists of today will be enshrined. The continuous story is told brick-to-brick, section to section of the times, places, artists and performers.
Stay tuned for grand opening dates and other exciting announcements.
(Much of the text above is courtesy of the SF Music City Hall of Fame Web site)
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