Since forming in 1996, Martyn Leaper and the Minders have morphed from Elephant 6 darlings to twee-pop anarchists, throwing love bombs and denouncing nothing. Most non-fans remember the Minders’ auspicious 1998 debut, Hooray For Tuesday, and its unfairly derided follow-up, 2001’s Golden Street, but the band was active until 2006’s slight-but-lovely It’s A Bright Guilty World. The Minders’ only interim release has been the second web-only iteration of their odds-and-sods Cul-De-Sacs And Dead Ends. In the gap, Leaper wrote and demoed new songs when he could crowbar it into his 40-hour work week. Along with renowned producer Larry Crane (Elliott Smith, Sleater-Kinney), Leaper began finding the thread of Into The River, the first actual Minders studio work in a decade. Leaper will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Minders feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejr9KBQzQPM
Leaper: Last Saturday, I visited the Portland Art museum to see the Andy Warhol exhibition: Prints From The Collections Of Jordan D. Schnitzer. The collection is extensive, and takes up more than two floors of the museum. Many of the artist’s well-known images are part of the exhibit. Such as, the Campbell Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe portraits and the series of Mick Jagger head shots. Some of the rare collections of Warhol’s early prints from his time as a student during the 1940s at the Carnegie Institute of Technology provided an insight into his formative works. Funnily enough, I drew a good deal of amusement from a film short that was being shown in an adjoining hallway between the exhibits. The five-minute segment is Warhol eating a Whopper. The short was shot by Danish filmmaker, Jorgen Leth, and is part of a collection of films named 66 scenes from America. This is not a paid endorsement of Warhol eating a Burger King hamburger; in fact as Leth points out: “Warhol is told that he has to say his name and that he should do so when he has finished performing his action, but what happens is that the action takes a very long time to perform; it’s simply agonizing. I have to admit that I personally adore that, because its a pure homage to Warhol. It couldn’t be more Warholesque. That’s of course why he agreed to do it.”
