Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Pink in the Mirror by A.M. Leibowitz Top 15 punk LPs of 1977 that undeniably defined the year. From the Stooges to New York Dolls, punk festered the entire ’70s. Punk festered the entire ’70s: The Stooges and New York Dolls cleared the field as all the misfits on the margins waited their turn, marinating in a stew of poverty, filth, midnight John Waters screenings, scratchy thrift-store garage and rockabilly 45s, ancient dimestore William S. Burroughs paperbacks and clothes stolen out of Goodwill dumpsters, then ripped apart and reassembled with safety pins. 1975 and 1976 may have been when it ripened, rising on rock and popular cultures’ face like an angry zit. But 1977 is when it burst, splattering like newly freed pus all over the mirror. The commercial effect in America was initially negligible, eventually trickling on to radio via Blondie , Joan Jett and the Clash , finally decimating the charts in the ’90s through Nirvana and the ’94 Green Day / Offspring / Rancid pop-based wave. But 1977 U.K. bands couldn’t work unless going punk. Acts such as the Jam, Buzzcocks and Generation X became Top Of The Pops regulars. Other countries’ commercial spaces were similarly hijacked by spiky-headed acts. Witness France’s occupation by bouncing Belgian snarler Plastic Bertrand and his silly yet infectious “Ca Plane Pour Moi.” Read more: KISS to play underwater gig for great white sharks, fan-filled submarine. The 45 RPM record was punk’s perfect medium. Singles fit a style favoring energy, brevity and immediacy: Say it all in three minutes or less. The faster playing speed means more volume (guitars sound hot . But some classic, gauntlet-laying full-lengths emerged in 1977. And not everything’s a Ramones or Sex Pistols Xerox. Each band brought individual influences and approaches. There wasn’t a punk rulebook yet. It initially meant something aggressive, economical, angry and energetic, ill-fitting elsewhere. Welcome to Year Zero. 1. Sex Pistols – Never Mind The Bollocks. Punk existed, pre-Sex Pistols. But every musical revolution requires some kamikaze shock troop embodying the values and crystalizing the sound/stance to kick down the door, allowing everyone else entrance and reflected glory. Paul Cook’s punk-Bonham drums, Steve Jones’ enormous chords/lockstep bass (blame Sid Vicious’ uselessness) and Johnny Rotten’s vocal shrapnel subverted (mis-)manager Malcolm McLaren’s ridiculous boy-band vision. Bollocks remains one of rock history’s most dangerous, thrilling LPs. It’s still all the Pistols you need: Everything else is a vault scraper. 2. Ramones – Rocket To Russia. Conventional wisdom holds Ramones LPs I-IV as the crucial ones. Leave Home ‘s production smoothed the ’76 debut’s rawness. But Rocket To Russia sounds more sympathetic—full and rich but ballsy frequencies, featuring Johnny Ramone’s most crushing guitar sound—and features some of Da Brudders’ most deathless songs (“Cretin Hop,” “Teenage Lobotomy,” “Rockaway Beach,” “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker”). If you need only one Ramones album capturing everything great about them, this is it. 3. The Clash – The Clash. Clash guitarist Mick Jones favors their first LP—their most definitive punk statement—above the rest. It was created in the same studio the Stooges cut Raw Power, their Ramonic velocity combined with power chords barked as hoarsely as Joe Strummer’s vocals in a 14-song encapsulation of a London burning with boredom and class rage. After realizing their entire live set proved six minutes shy of a standard LP length, Junior Murvin’s reggae hit “Police & Thieves” received a rockin’ upgrade, giving punk a new rebel-rock direction. 4. The Damned – Damned Damned Damned. The Damned beat the rest of Britpunk at everything: first single, first tour, first LP, first U.S. invasion, first breakup and reformation. Nick Lowe recorded them exactly as producing legend Shel Talmy cut the Kinks and Who: live in one room on a ’60s eight-track machine, tube compressors maxed, amps blasting beside Rat Scabies’ crazed drums. Tunes such as “So Messed Up” snapshot life in the margins over a loud, speedy mashup of garage/Stooges/Dolls riffarama. 5. Dead Boys – Young, Loud And Snotty. Like the Sex Pistols, Cleveland’s Dead Boys factored strong doses of Midwestern hard-rock bombast into their Stooges/MC5/Dolls worship. Alice Cooper’s a guiding spirit: He’s audible in Stiv Bators’ kamikaze vocals, and Glen Buxton seems to have flavored Cheetah Chrome’s blitzkrieg leads as much as James Williamson or Johnny Thunders. Factor in anthems such as “Sonic Reducer” and “Ain’t Nothin’ To Do,” and you have the perfect soundtrack for middle-American teenage boredom and juvenile delinquency. This is arguably the definitive non-Ramones American punk statement. 6. Richard Hell And The Voidoids – Blank Generation. Richard Hell was Patti Smith’s chief competition in the NYC gutter-poet stakes. Besides perfecting the early punk look and aesthetic in Television and the Heartbreakers, it took his emerging as a solo artist fronting the Voidoids for the world to get a full-length peek inside Hell’s mind. Owing as much to free-jazz icon Ornette Coleman as the Velvet Underground, Hell exposes a raw nerve atop Robert Quine’s abstract expressionist guitar and Marc Bell pounding more complex beats than he would as a Ramone. Punk as beatnik jazz, beret unnecessary. 7. Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers – L.A.M.F. One theory, seemingly expired in the millennium except among garage-istas, has punk to be rock ‘n’ roll stripped to its primal core. No band more exemplified this theory more potently than Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan’s post-New York Dolls outfit. Despite a poor mastering job in its initial release, the music accurately showcased the Heartbreakers’ molotov Chuck Berry-isms and gutter charisma. Drenched in now-standards such as “Chinese Rocks” and “Born To Lose,” it’s remained a blueprint for narcotized rock ‘n’ roll, from the Replacements to Guns N’ Roses. 8. The Saints – (I’m) Stranded. Had there not been a Ramones, the Saints would have done quite nicely. Their noisy, high-speed, homemade 1976 45 “(I’m) Stranded” seemingly shocked the entire planet: Another three-chord chainsaw-guitar band had developed Down Under, oblivious to the hey-ho-let’s-go battle cry emanating from CBGBs. Ed Kuepper’s filthy blur-action chording had the back of history’s most bored-sounding singer, Chris Bailey, and they got bored with punk quickly. But “(I’m) Stranded” is as definitive a punk statement as anyone’s made, ever . 9. Wire – Pink Flag. Meet punk’s first conceptual artists and post-modernists. If punk guitars were meant to be distorted, Wire’s would be more distorted than anyone’s. If the songs were supposed to be short and stripped down, theirs would be even more of a reducto ad absurdum —a lyric was written, then read over the hurtling music. Once the text ran out, the song stopped. In slamming out 21 songs in just over 35 minutes, Pink Flag has endured as a major influence on hardcore’s brutal early ’80s advent. 10. Radio Birdman – Radios Appear. Led by blistering guitarist/songwriter/future fighter pilot/surgeon Deniz Tek (an Ann Arbor native single-handedly responsible for making Detroit the musical capital of Australia), Birdman spread the MC5/Stooges gospel far and wide. Mixing it with a dash of the Doors and a dose of Blue Oyster Cult, Radios Appear was a burst of primal scream rock ‘n’ roll. Tracks such as “What Gives?” and “Murder City Nights” build the tension until it exploded in the instant classic ampheta-teen anthem “New Race.” Radio Birdman definitely rival AC/DC as Australia’s most influential band. 11. Iggy Pop – Lust For Life. Relocating to Berlin in tow of buddy David Bowie in 1976, the Stooges’ mainman was desperately trying to live down his blood-and-peanut- butter-smeared past on his solo debut, The Idiot. Five months later, Lust For Life plied the same Bowie-fueled, motorik-inspired art rock, but with perhaps a heavier dose of Detroit-esque atavism. Ignore the title track’s later ubiquity as a commercial jingle/movie soundtrack staple: Don’t you wanna gleefully dive onto a bed of busted beer bottles once you hear Hunt Sales’ Gene-Krupa-live-at-Motown drums? Absolutely Iggy’s best solo album. 12. Suicide – Suicide. 10 years after its release, Your Humble Narrator cleared an entire dorm full of Smiths / R.E.M. fans with the world’s first electro-punk LP: “OMG! It’s so relentless ! And noisy ! And angry! ” Yes, it is. Those are the good qualities. “Ghost Rider” and “Frankie Teardrop” still hold much terrifying power. 13. Chrome – Alien Soundtracks. Initially a rejected score for a radical San Francisco strip show, Chrome’s second LP was the first to pair multi-instrumentalist founder Damon Edge with crazed guitarist Helios Creed. If Iggy And The Stooges’ Raw Power was the sound of the Rolling Stones in hell, then Alien Soundtracks was the sound of the Stooges in hell, as a lo-fi sci-fi soundscape. The crude bashing and trash-compactor riffing had an acid-damaged edge, making this record both an avant-punk staple and early industrial-rock statement. 14. The Jam – This Is The Modern World. For all its Year Zero rejection of the past, punk had strong historical roots. Consider the Sex Pistols’ Who and Small Faces covers, the Clash’s pilfered Kinks riffs or the Ramones’ covers of Latino R&B singer Chris Montez and vocal surf outfit the Rivieras. The Jam made it explicit: They were a Who/Small Faces-esque mod trio for spike tops. Apply Pistols-esque anger, energy and aggression to Paul Weller’s Ray Davies-ish songs and you get perfect pogo anthems such as the title track and “All Around The World.” 15. The Real Kids – The Real Kids. You’ve never heard of them, but the Real Kids are punk immortals. John Felice apprenticed in Boston’s great proto-punk contribution, the Modern Lovers, clearly learning a thing or two about tight, dynamic songcraft from Jonathan Richman. His ear for effective guitar hooks is as good as Keith Richards’ or John Fogerty’s. The Real Kids’ songs all sounded like Felice had the world’s best AM radio glued to his ear, one which also playlisted the Ramones, Heartbreakers and Flamin’ Groovies. If you think you are not photogenic, you're about to be pleasantly surprised. PinkMirror is Do-It-Yourself tool. 4 Simple steps to retouch your portrait and look at your best. World's Best Automatic Portrait Retouching. 16 Easy Photo Retouching Features That Make You Look Your Best In Just Seconds. Spot Removal. Embarrassed by dark marks, freckles, age spots or scars? Don’t stress. PinkMirror automatically transforms your skin in photos, and makes it look soft, smooth and glowing. Best of all, you won’t even have to perform any work to get beautiful-looking skin, since PinkMirror instantly covers up skin spots for you. Wrinkle reduction. Imagine your face without wrinkles, crow’s feet and frown lines. 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At PinkMirror, we are trained in understanding human beauty and finding ways to help you improve yours. About Us. Think photo enhancement tools are difficult to use? PinkMirror is the world’s fastest and easiest beauty enhancement suite that transforms your photos in a matter of seconds. Pink in the Mirror by A.M. Leibowitz. Mirrors can be functional, decorative, or both at the same time. For the bedroom, a leaning floor mirror, door mirror, or dresser mirror is ideal. Choose a decorative wall mirror, framed mirror, or starburst mirror for the living room. Oversize mirrors and large mirrors are great as bathroom mirrors. Choose the right style or shape to fit your space with our collection of round mirrors, rectangular mirrors, modern mirrors or vintage mirrors. Don’t forget to watch out for our next mirror sale to get the best deal. Opinion: The NFL’s Pink October is a publicity stunt. Hardly any of the money raised goes toward cancer awareness, education or screenings. Cameron Heyward of the Pittsburgh Steelers was fined by the NFL for paying tribute to his father, former player Craig “Iron Head' Heyward, who died of cancer in 2006. Email icon Facebook icon Twitter icon Linkedin icon Flipboard icon Print icon Resize icon. The NFL cares as much about cancer as a cancer patient cares about NFL merchandise sales. We are in the middle of Pink October, four weeks in which the National Football League uses the gauze-thin veil of “cancer research” to justify the sale of pink merchandise and the auction of even costlier game-worn pink merchandise. It’s become such a brazen publicity stunt that each year, we’re treated to a different story about how the NFL raises just about no money to increase cancer awareness, education or screenings. In 2013, ESPN’s Darren Rovell noted that the NFL “takes a 25% royalty from the wholesale price (1/2 retail), [and] donates 90% of [the] royalty to [the] American Cancer Society.” That gives the American Cancer Society just $11.25 for every $100 of pink merchandise sold. Of that, only about 70% goes to cancer programs. However, last year, Vice noted that Pink October money doesn’t go toward cancer research, but toward screenings. The argument is that screenings save lives, but even the American Cancer Society now admits that mammograms may not always be the best bet for early detection. Meanwhile, the NFL’s Pink October has yielded only $1.1 million every year since it partnered with ACS seven years ago. That scarcely registers as a fraction of the more than $10 billion the league made in revenue last year, nor does it equal a half percent of the $226 million the league doles out from its television revenue to its 32 teams just for existing. However, none of that indicates that the NFL actively ignores cancer. It just proves the league and its owners are cheap. No, to actively not care about cancer and its effects, it would have to openly exploit someone dying of cancer — say, former Carolina Panthers and current Pittsburgh Steelers running back DeAngelo Williams’ mother, Sandra Hill. The Panthers brought Hill out for October breast cancer events in the past, but just about no one from the organization attended her funeral last year. This year, though the NFL was fine with DeAngelo Williams cutting a promotional video for its October breast-cancer push, it denied his request to honor his mother by allowing him to wear pink throughout the season. Yet the league stands by its decision as a uniform issue, with its rule book stating that the NFL “will not grant permission for any club or player to wear, display, or otherwise convey messages, through helmet decals, arm bands, jersey patches, or other items affixed to game uniforms or equipment, which relate to political activities or causes, other non-football events, causes or campaigns, or charitable causes or campaigns.” Yet, when Pittsburgh Steelers defensive end Cameron Heyward paid tribute to his father — former NFL fullback Craig “Iron Head” Heyward, who died of cancer in 2006 — by writing “Iron Head” on his eye black during Monday night’s game against the St. Louis Rams, he was fined nearly $6,000 for a uniform violation. Because he’s as tough as his dad (who singlehandedly got football-watching males to ditch bars of soap and washcloths for body wash and luffas), he’s appealing the decision, noting that he just wants to do it for the month and “in a month when breast cancer is honored, I think every type of cancer should be honored as well.” Heyward comes across as a nice guy and legitimately doesn’t want to step on toes. However, we’ll note that not only is the NFL throwing pennies at the very real problem of breast cancer and not allowing players to draw attention to the disease outside the league’s designated one-month breast-cancer zone, it’s now actively preventing players from calling attention to various forms of cancer during that window. In Heyward’s case, he lost a father to a bone cancer that could have been more easily treated if caught before it was discovered through Craig Heyward’s blurry vision in 1998 and could have been staved off through monitoring before it recurred in 2006. Craig Heyward was taken away by cancer at the age of 39. The NFL and its players could be a force for change in the medical community and help people as young as its own players survive cancer and live fuller, happier lives. However, in a league where “caring” about concussions and the health of former players extends to a settlement payout and scant acknowledgment that the problem isn’t going away, we shouldn’t be surprised that the NFL is treating cancer with anything but lipstick-pink lip service. The Mirror & the Light. Looking for an escape from quarantine boredom, but want to minimize your screen time? Then Hillary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light , the final, nearly 800-page volume of her bestselling, Booker-Prize winning, Wolf Hall trilogy, comes at a propitious moment. Alas, however, those hoping to find in Tudor England a refuge from current events may be disappointed to find how scarily Mantel’s King Henry VIII resembles a more proximate, but equally villainous ruler. The 16th century British monarch was a bloated, insecure, querulous, narcissist who couldn’t seem to retain members of his government—or wives. Of course, Henry’s councilors and two of his wives who fell from favor also lost their heads, rather than just their positions. One minister who survived the longest and closest to the king was the wily royal advisor Thomas Cromwell, who for a time was Henry’s closest confidant and fixer, for eight years his chief minister. Mantel’s first two volumes, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies charted Cromwell’s rise. The Mirror and the Light tracks the apogee of that rise, and his precipitous fall. As in the trilogy’s first two books, there are interspersed flashbacks to Cromwell’s youth and young adult years, including time as a blacksmith’s helper, a Lambeth Palace kitchen boy, a mercenary in Italy, and a merchant in Belgium. Mantel’s Cromwell revels in his exalted station, and is not shy about taking credit. “It is I who tell [Henry] who he can marry and unmarry and who he can marry next, and who and how to kill,” Mantel’s Cromwell brags. “Seven years I have stood by [Henry’s] elbow while he sets a course. I found him in low water… bereft of good advice, gnawed by intermittent lusts, frustrated by his advisors, hamstrung by his own laws. I filled his treasury, made his coinage sound; I packed off his old wife and got him a new one of his choosing; while I did this I soothed his temper and told him jokes.” But his primary function is to be the erratic monarch’s enabler, a formidable task. Since Henry did not come from one of England’s great families, his claim to the throne was tenuous. Numerous nobles viewed him as an illegitimate ruler. “To them,” Cromwell muses, “Henry Tudor is the son of Welsh horse-thieves: a parvenu, a usurper, a man to whom oaths may be broken.” Similarly, some in these noble English families bitterly resented Cromwell’s own rise from humble origins, as the son of a brutal, provincial blacksmith, to become the country’s second most powerful, after the king. As Henry’s secretary and Lord Privy Seal, Cromwell was chief among a generation dubbed “new men,” those without title or fortunes, an emerging middle class of merchants and lawyers, whom Henry raised to power and influence. Owing the king everything, they posed no threat to his throne, unlike the old noble families. “Majesty,” one nobleman says, “is there no stopping these new men?” “I hope not,” Henry replies, “I rely on them.” Henry exacerbated his position, courting civil war by splitting with the Catholic Church, when the Vatican refused to accept his divorce from his long-suffering queen, Katherine of Aragon, who could not produce a son and heir. So treasonous plots and rebellions pervaded his reign. Mantel’s Cromwell reads Machiavelli’s The Prince , comparing Henry—favorably—to the subject of the book, Lorenzo de Medici. “The king has nothing to learn from Niccolo’s book,” Cromwell observes. Yet this knowledge this does not save the Lord Privy Seal from his fatal falling out with Henry. Bitter nobles and his own envious subordinates engineered Cromwell’s swift and precipitous fall. He received no jury trial. Instead, he faced a process called a “Bill of Attainder,” essentially a rubber stamp trial hurried through Parliament (and specifically prohibited in the U.S. Constitution). “I cannot complain of the process,” he thinks to himself while being interrogated in the Tower of London. “I have used it myself.” Shifting to the third person, he reflects that he “has lived by the laws he has made and must be content to die by them.” In the end, Cromwell fell short in two matters close to King Henry’s heart. First, the consummate fixer was unable to accomplish the assassination of Catholic Cardinal Reginald Pole, a serious claimant to Henry’s throne, in Pole’s Italian exile. When his interrogators raise this issue, Cromwell is not surprised. “He thinks [to himself], now we come to it. This is why Henry faults me. This is where I have failed.” Second, Cromwell chose Ann of Cleves, a German princess, to be the king’s fourth wife. Henry found her so grossly unattractive that he could not consummate the marriage. It is difficult to summon much sympathy for Cromwell, an undeniably skilled, but amoral man who was not above using torture and worse. He hanged dissident bishops and abbots, and betrayed—fatally—a guarantee of safe conduct to a rebel leader. Infamously, Cromwell deftly smoothed the way for Sir Thomas More to the executioner’s block, a role portrayed in both the cable series The Tudors and the BBC’s Wolf Hall. (More himself tortured and burned heretics, yet the Vatican canonized him, as did Robert Bolton in A Man for all Seasons . Hence, More is much better remembered than Cromwell today.) Most egregiously, Cromwell engineered the execution of five men almost certainly innocent of the charges of sleeping with the then Queen Anne Boleyn. Her only real crime, like Queen Katherine’s, was her inability to produce a male heir for King Henry. As Cromwell’s execution nears, victims’ ghosts return to haunt him as he looks around his cell: “He feels he is dragging corpses, shoveling them up.” While he begs the king for mercy, he is resigned to his fate. “The law is not an instrument to find out truth,” he says.” It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.” Unlike Thomas More, Cromwell died for no cause or conscience. “Most will not think of me as a martyr for anything, except the great cause of getting on in life.” It is a testament to Mantel’s monumental historical-novelist skills that her portrait of Cromwell demonstrates the truth that, in fiction, point of view is pivotal. It is hard not to identify with Cromwell, despite her protagonist’s flaws. Mantel imagines Cromwell’s thoughts convincingly. This is especially true when the narrative is cloaked in deep, detailed, sometimes microscopic historical research (including sumptuous meal menus), coupled with great imagination and elegant, compelling prose. Lyrical writing abounds, including one of several passages evoking the book’s title: “The sky has become a mirror,” Cromwell thinks while riding one evening with his son, “against which the sun moves: light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world.” Along the way, Mantel provides some fascinating touches: Henry makes the German portraitist Hans Holbein “the King’s Painter.” Henry then dispatches Holbein to Europe with his diplomatic envoys to serve as his wing man at one remove, painting prospective brides. The prevalent view is that Mantel’s novels are written for “A” students. But for the rest of us, they are well worth the stretch.