My angels Please don’t take me for granted – I’m a rare Freak of nature and now is the time to appreciate What I am saying to the Earth Love, Steven Arnold September 10, 1990 I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m someone who lives for outsider art and culture, and like the other contributors to Dangerous Minds, it’s fun for me, as that kind of extreme “infomaniac,” to be able to marquee for our readers in some way the various weird things that I know about, stumble across acidentally or that gets submitted to us. A big part of the enjoyment also comes from seeing what everyone else comes up with—I get it at just about the same time that you do—and the most fun of all is when I get to discover something that’s totally unknown to me that perhaps I should have known about, but didn’t. I’m usually pretty hard to stump, but it’s the best thing ever, as far as I’m concerned, when that does happen. Like with the work of Steven Arnold. Prior to March of this year, I’d never heard of him. For...
Whereas I was not exactly a Crass punk myself, I was definitely sort of Crass punk adjacent. The image conjured up of a Crass punk tends to be one of a smelly squatter, a stinky dole-scrounging vegan anarchist smoking roll-ups and sniffing glue. In 1983 and 84 I was a teenage squatter in the Brixton area of London (and before that in the infamous Wyers squat in Amsterdam), but I was a well-groomed American kid who saw no reason to stop bathing, or to change out of my normal clothes when I went to see a punk band just so I would fit in. I found it funny to show up for a Flux of Pink Indians gig at the Ambulance Station wearing a pink tennis shirt or penny loafers and white Levis to a Poison Girls show. At least it was amusing TO ME. Plus I’d have looked like a dummy in punk clothes. I never had any interest in “being different” like everybody else. Wearing the uniform of non-conformity, one which was apparently collectively agreed upon, had little appeal for me. In 1984? I saw it a bit like I saw tie-dye to be honest. Perhaps I was just...
A winged subterranean creature fires out of a mountain cave to release or is it perhaps to devour a golden bird—or the symbol for the Holy Spirit?—against a blue winter sky.
The Beatles, 1972 Tadanori Yokoo was one of the dominant figures, if not the dominant figure, in Japanese design starting in the Sixties. Some people liken his work to Andy Warhol but I scarcely see that, unless you’re talking about general importance and influence, in which case I can’t judge. I think Richard got it right last year when he invoked Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Peter Max, particularly Max. In addition to his (usually) symmetrical, DayGlo, ligne claire works, Yokoo also did a good number of rock-related graphics. The funny thing is that they’re in a completely different photocollage style—you can tell it might be by the same person but aside from that, they’re not too similar to stuff like this. I find all of these images delightful and fascinating. They’re trippy and detailed with a strong design sense, and the use of photos prevents them from flying off into the ether. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, 1972 Cat Stevens, 1972 Santana, 1974 Earth, Wind, & Fire, 1976 Tangerine Dream, 1976 The Beatles, Star Club, 1977 Earth, Wind, & Fire, 1993 Aa a bonus, here’s Tadanori’s cover for Miles Davis’ 1975 album Agharta.
John Lydon by Brendan McCarthy Like many of you, I was once an avid collector of comic books. While it’s still in my nature to pick up an occasionally graphic novel (my last one was The Big Book of Mischief from the great UK illustrator, Krent Able), I was naturally drawn to the illustrations of the punks from the 70s done by several artists who would go on to make great contributions to the world of comic book art in a publication from 1981, Visions of Rock. Visions of Rock by Mal Burns (on the cover Chrissie Hynde, Rod Stewart and Debbie Harry) Although including Rod Stewart on the cover is a bit perplexing (as are some of the illustrations in the book itself) loads of incredibly talented illustrators contributed work to Visions of Rock such as Bryan Talbot (who worked on Sandman with Neil Gaiman), Brett Ewins (of Judge Dredd fame who sadly passed away in February of this year), Brendan McCarthy (who most recently worked with George Miller on a little film called Mad Max: Fury Road, perhaps you’ve heard of it) and Hunt Emerson whose work appears in nearly every book in...
“L’Amour,” probably William Mortensen’s most famous image It’s not many photographers whose works can withstand comparison to Rembrandt and Vermeer, but if there is one, then William Mortensen is that photographer. Debates about the “status” of photography as both neutral recorder of reality and device for exuberant expressions of artifice are as dusty as the question of who “lost” China—it’s both—but Mortensen was decidedly pitched on one end of that debate, on the side of those who would meticulously create an expressive illusion for the purpose of being captured by the lens. Few were greater at that particular skill. Anton LaVey was a fan, and so was Ansel Adams who called him the “Antichrist.” William Mortensen was clearly no ordinary photographer. Monsters and Madonnas is the name of a 23-minute documentary narrated by Vincent Price about Mortensen’s life and particularly his stunning work that was completed sometime in the early 1960s. Born in Utah, William Mortensen spent the formative years of his career in Hollywood working as a still photographer on Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings, among other gigs, before setting up shop in Laguna Beach in 1931. Mortensen’s experiences...
Way, way back in 1989, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote an obituary of the then-recently deceased activist/organizer/author/provocateur Abbot Howard “Abbie” Hoffman, calling him an “activist with Jewish soul.” That, he was, 100%. There was plenty to criticize about the man—he could be arrogant, and he contributed significantly to the Baby Boom’s decoupling of the left from the labor movement, a move that significantly damaged both institutions—but he brought theatricality and exuberance to the often humorless politics of the left, and he was motivated by a genuine and irrepressible desire to see the spoils of America’s prosperity and justice offered to ALL of its citizens. Hoffman addressed the Jewish foundations of his political ethos in his autobiography Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, and those connections were discussed in his JTA obit: “Judaism has never been so much a religion to me as a noble history and a cluster of stereotypes. Jews, especially first-born male Jews, have to make a big choice very quickly in life whether to go for the money or to go for broke.” Hoffman never made a lot of money, preferring to eschew the life of the yuppie in order...
Get them young and you’ll have them for life. That was the maxim when I worked in television. It was called “creating brand loyalty,” which probably explains why the bloke who was then Chief Executive of the broadcaster who occasionally employed me, was responsible for making “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” a big success in the UK. I suppose, this maxim was a more cynical variation of the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” Brand loyalty was a way of ensuring the audience stuck with the channel and watched the adverts. Programs were the wrapping paper for the advertisements. Advertisers in a way dictated the kinds of things that could or could not be seen on commercial TV. In the seventies, creating early brand loyalty saw the publication of children’s magazine Look-In in January 1971. Look-In was the equivalent of kids’ TV Guide or as it was known “The Junior TVTimes.” The TVTimes was the rival listing publication to the BBC’s Radio Times. There were basically two broadcasters back then—the BBC which was financed by a compulsory license fee payable by...
Get them young and you’ll have them for life. That was the maxim when I worked in television. It was called “creating brand loyalty,” which probably explains why the bloke who was then Chief Executive of the broadcaster who occasionally employed me, was responsible for making “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” a big success in the UK. I suppose, this maxim was a more cynical variation of the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” Brand loyalty was a way of ensuring the audience stuck with the channel and watched the adverts. Programs were the wrapping paper for the advertisements. Advertisers in a way dictated the kinds of things that could or could not be seen on commercial TV. In the seventies, creating early brand loyalty saw the publication of children’s magazine Look-In in January 1971. Look-In was the equivalent of kids’ TV Guide or as it was known “The Junior TVTimes.” The TVTimes was the rival listing publication to the BBC’s Radio Times. There were basically two broadcasters back then—the BBC which was financed by a compulsory license fee payable by...
Fast on the heels of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency investigation into the dire influence of comic books, innovative and transgressive E.C. Comics released its brief educational, edifying New Direction series. One of the New Direction titles was Psychoanalysis, beginning in May 1955, illustrated by Jack Kamen and depicting psychoanalytic therapy sessions as story lines. It was an unusual idea to present such a realistic, near-clinical drama, and neither readers nor wholesalers knew what to do with it. The comic lasted only four issues before it was cancelled along with other “wholesome” New Direction titles (M.D., Valor, Extra!, Incredible Science Fiction, Aces High, and Impact). According to Life Hacks’ Vaughan Bell: Critics have noted that psychiatry is poorly represented in these stories, although they do give a fascinating insight into 1950s attitudes towards people with mental illness and their treatment. Despite the fact mental illness is a recurring theme in many contemporary comics, few modern titles have attempted to seriously educate their readers about mental health issues. Each issue followed the stories of three patients’ psychological issues and how they were quickly cured through traditional Freudian psychoanalysis. Polite Dissent‘s Polite Scott described...
Clean cut, All-American crooner Gene Pitney was a massive star in the 1960s—and remained popular in Europe long after that—but, oldies radio aside, he is all but forgotten today in the country of his birth. Pitney possessed one of the most distinctive male voices of the 60s, a high-pitched, quavering vibrato that made his songs of unrequited love and losers promising to prove themselves to their women particularly moving. Starting off as a songwriter—Pitney wrote “He’s a Rebel” for the Crystals and “Hello Mary Lou” for Rick Nelson—and recording engineer, Pitney racked up an impressive string of sixteen top forty hits. Along with but a small handful of American performers (Roy Orbison, Beach Boys, The Supremes) Gene Pitney not only survived the British invasion, but practically became an honorary member of it. In fact, he played piano on the first Rolling Stones album. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reciprocated by gifting him with “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” a top ten hit in Britain and the first hit song they would write together. (Pitney also had an affair with Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, who allegedly said he was the “best lay” she ever...
Penny in frame from 16mm film Lilford Hall, 1969, by Penny Slinger and Peter Whitehead My reaction upon recently being exposed to the work of Penny Slinger, a bold and penetrating surrealist multimedia artist from the U.K. who produced her most striking work in the late 1960s and 1970s, was to suppose that there must have been a mistake of some sort. Slinger’s work, which spans photography, collage, and sculpture, uses techniques of surrealism to address highly pertinent topics of sexuality, gender, and identity in ways that make quite a few people uncomfortable—which is all to her credit, of course. What I could not comprehend, given the stunning clarity, precision, and power of her work, was her relative lack of recognition, a matter that a new documentary by director Richard Kovitch seeks to remedy. The movie, called Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows, places the pressing question of the artist’s rediscovery—as well as a major theme of her work—squarely in its title. Born Penelope Slinger in 1947 London to a middle-class family, Slinger attended art school in the mid- to late 1960s, where she was exposed to the work of surrealist Max Ernst, whose art...
Get them young and you’ll have them for life. That was the maxim when I worked in television. It was called “creating brand loyalty,” which probably explains why the bloke who was then Chief Executive of the broadcaster who occasionally employed me, was responsible for making “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” a big success in the UK. I suppose, this maxim was a more cynical variation of the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” Brand loyalty was a way of ensuring the audience stuck with the channel and watched the adverts. Programs were the wrapping paper for the advertisements. Advertisers in a way dictated the kinds of things that could or could not be seen on commercial TV. In the seventies, creating early brand loyalty saw the publication of children’s magazine Look-In in January 1971. Look-In was the equivalent of kids’ TV Guide or as it was known “The Junior TVTimes.” The TVTimes was the rival listing publication to the BBC’s Radio Times. There were basically two broadcasters back then—the BBC which was financed by a compulsory license fee payable by...
American illustrator, cartoonist, author and designer, Bob Staake, has some fun with classic children’s books and turns them into something quite… dark. Via Nerdcore
A painting of a pin-up mashedup with mechanical parts from a Mercedes Benz by Fernando Vicente. Self-taught Spanish painter, artist and illustrator Fernando Vicente has been working at his craft since the early 80s in Madrid and his work has been featured in publications all around the world such as Playboy, Vogue and various European magazines and book covers. In the case of Vicente’s series Anatomies the artist has united two of his favorite things—his love of mechanics and anatom—to rather strangely stellar results. According to Vicente the bionic pin-ups featured in Anatomies came to be after the artist purchased a large collection of posters from an actual mechanic which he then incorporated into his paintings creating a kind of sexy “cyberpunk” woman with her inner “mechanical anatomy” exposed. During his career Vicente has collected hordes of materials such as maps, atlases, medical books, and vintage advertising posters during his frequent visits to flea markets held in and around Madrid, all of which end up being incorporated into his compelling creations. As you will see in this post Vicente is fairly enamoured with what’s going on inside the human body. Here’s more from Vicente...
One evening at a local fleapit in Germany, sometime in the 1920s, a young woman stood on stage while the projectionist changed reels between movies and performed her latest dance called Pause. The woman was Valeska Gert who was well-known for her wild, unpredictable, highly controversial, beautiful yet often grotesque performances. The audience waited expectantly, a few coughs, a few giggles, but Gert did not move. She stood motionless in a slightly contrived awkward position and stared off into the distance. The audience grew restless. What the fuck was going on? The lights dimmed, the performance ended, and the movie came on. This wasn’t just dance, this was anti-dance. This was performance art. And nobody knew what to make of it. Nijinsky had tried something similar a few years earlier, when he sat on the stage to a small audience and said something like: “And now I dance for you the meaning of the War.” He ended up in the booby-hatch. Gert thankfully didn’t. She just antagonized the bourgeoisie and inspired a whole new way of performance. Valeska Gert was born Gertrud Valesca Samosch in Berlin, on January 11th, 1892. Her father was a highly successful businessman and...
A terrifying still of Joan Crawford and her best friend, an axe, from the 1964 film, ‘Strait-Jacket.’ Though she was widely vilified by the gossip columnists of her time and is best recalled today for being a very bad mommie, it is impossible to dispute the fact that Joan Crawford was one hell of an actress. She was a talented dancer and worked as a showgirl before starting her long career in Hollywood during which she became one of the most iconic actresses of all time. She also served on the board of directors of the Pepsi-Cola Company for well over a decade. Even Blue Öyster Cult wrote a song about her. And for yours truly, street credibility just doesn’t get any better than being immortalized by the mighty BÖC. Joan Crawford was tough—a defense mechanism that she likely developed during her difficult childhood. While attending a private school she paid her tuition by doing jobs at the school such as washing dishes; cooking; making beds, and waitressing. Due to this overload of work, her studies suffered. Crawford dropped out of school in the sixth grade—something that the actress allegedly deeply regretted. However, the event would also...
Panel #12: “And Mark said the three R’s were ‘Repetition, Repetition, Repetition….” I learned recently that antifolk musician and comix artist Jeffrey Lewis is a huge fan of the Fall, which, as it happens, I am as well. Lewis tends to celebrate his artistic heroes in his songs and artwork; some of his song titles are “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” and “The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song.” One senses in Lewis’ love for Smith a respectful acknowledgment from one ultra-prolific artist to another. Lewis has fashioned a kind of “Where’s Waldo” poster involving many, many, many Fall tracks, under the title “100 Fall Songs,” which actually contains visual references to 112 Fall ditties. You can buy that at his website, and it even comes with a key so that you can test your Fall knowledge. In 2007 and 2008 Lewis was given to a quickie “documentary” (his term) about the Fall that he would do in his live shows; maybe he’s done it since but he was definitely doing it at that time. The title of the piece is “The Legend of the Fall,” and if that puts you in the mind of a certain Jim Harrison novella that was turned...
Yesterday The A.V. Club alerted me to this wonderful Twitter account Paperback Paradise whose motto is “The world’s #1 used book store.” Much like LiarsTown USA or Dangerous Minds’ pal Cris Shapan’s work—Paperback Paradise offers up an amusing alternate universe of photoshopped delights. Some of these are truly fucking funny. If you dig what you see here, you can follow Paperback Paradise on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. via The A.V. Club
A winged subterranean creature fires out of a mountain cave to release or is it perhaps to devour a golden bird—or the symbol for the Holy Spirit?—against a blue winter sky.
Around the end of the ‘90s, an art dealer friend of mine began bringing traveling exhibitions of Polish posters to town. It was eye-opening stuff—Eastern Europe has long had a tradition for outstanding poster art, its artists boasting stunning skills, married to an admirable obeisance to the visual legacy of traditional printmaking methods and jaw-droppingly inventive surrealist-influenced illustration. It was at one of those poster shows that I bought an item that remains one of my most cherished possessions: Istvan Orosz: Etchings and Posters, a slipcased, hand printed letterpress book from 1998, from an edition of only 750 (a second edition of 300 was made in 2000), published by the apparently now defunct GrafikARCHIVE Publishing of Kansas City, MO. From an archived mirror of the company’s web site: This first book features the work of internationally renowned Hungarian designer ISTVAN OROSZ. Fold out pages, envelopes with small printed pages of art, several different types of paper; “a feast for the eyes and the hands” (International Paper). The book received the ADDY Award in 1999 for its imaginative presentation by the firm DESIGN RANCH. Slipcase, wire-O bound in portfolio form, 82 pages with numerous 1 to 3 color illustrations. Essays by Roberta Lord (US) and Andras...
Ffo is a Moscow-based artist who creates beautiful, strange and surreal collages from anatomical illustrations, classical art, 1950’s pop culture images and Art Nouveau prints. What little is known about this anonymous artist comes directly from the answers given to questions asked by fans. From these we learn Ffo studied at art college for three years before turning his/her talents to creating collages. I’m focusing on making collages cuz it’s a really great way to express yourself, for me it’s also a symbol of contemporary world – a hard mix of different people, styles, cultures, eras, like there are no borders between art and reality anymore. It’s very beautiful, multi-layered, provocative and bizarre. Ffo describes him/herself as “a stalker” who takes “inspiration [from] almost from everything” but mainly life: [P]eople are my main inspiration, their appearance, relationships, conversations, feelings. Allmost all my works represent my own emotions and desires and means a lot for me. Ffo makes paper collage with Paint Tool SAI to create fabulously surreal, disturbing yet highly charged images. Once a collage is finished, it is published online at the Ffo Art blog. There is something about Ffo’s work...
Get them young and you’ll have them for life. That was the maxim when I worked in television. It was called “creating brand loyalty,” which probably explains why the bloke who was then Chief Executive of the broadcaster who occasionally employed me, was responsible for making “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” a big success in the UK. I suppose, this maxim was a more cynical variation of the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” Brand loyalty was a way of ensuring the audience stuck with the channel and watched the adverts. Programs were the wrapping paper for the advertisements. Advertisers in a way dictated the kinds of things that could or could not be seen on commercial TV. In the seventies, creating early brand loyalty saw the publication of children’s magazine Look-In in January 1971. Look-In was the equivalent of kids’ TV Guide or as it was known “The Junior TVTimes.” The TVTimes was the rival listing publication to the BBC’s Radio Times. There were basically two broadcasters back then—the BBC which was financed by a compulsory license fee payable by...
Get them young and you’ll have them for life. That was the maxim when I worked in television. It was called “creating brand loyalty,” which probably explains why the bloke who was then Chief Executive of the broadcaster who occasionally employed me, was responsible for making “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” a big success in the UK. I suppose, this maxim was a more cynical variation of the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” Brand loyalty was a way of ensuring the audience stuck with the channel and watched the adverts. Programs were the wrapping paper for the advertisements. Advertisers in a way dictated the kinds of things that could or could not be seen on commercial TV. In the seventies, creating early brand loyalty saw the publication of children’s magazine Look-In in January 1971. Look-In was the equivalent of kids’ TV Guide or as it was known “The Junior TVTimes.” The TVTimes was the rival listing publication to the BBC’s Radio Times. There were basically two broadcasters back then—the BBC which was financed by a compulsory license fee payable by...
The MacPaint years: ‘George & James,’ Volume One of the Residents’ American Composer Series It’s starting to look like the Residents are probably not going to finish that American Composers Series they abandoned back in 1986. The first volume, George & James, was a promising beginning: one side of George Gershwin tunes played in the style of the Mole Trilogy, one side of James Brown classics bellowed in a monstrous voice that made the Godfather of Soul sound like he was 100 feet tall and in danger of crushing the Apollo Theater beneath his feet. The Residents set out their ambitions in the liner notes: THIS SERIES IS TO BE RECORDED DURING THE FINAL SIXTEEN YEARS OF THE 20TH CENTURY (1984-2000). WHILE EACH RECORD WILL BE RELEASED UPON COMPLETION, THE WORK, AS A WHOLE, WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE UNTIL 2001 AND WILL CONTAIN THE WORKS OF NOT LESS THAN TWENTY COMPOSERS. Volume Two, ‘Stars & Hank Forever!’ But the American Composers Series ended abruptly after the second installment, an interpretation of the music of John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams called Stars & Hank Forever (with an excellent mash-up avant la lettre of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and Williams’ “...
Get them young and you’ll have them for life. That was the maxim when I worked in television. It was called “creating brand loyalty,” which probably explains why the bloke who was then Chief Executive of the broadcaster who occasionally employed me, was responsible for making “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” a big success in the UK. I suppose, this maxim was a more cynical variation of the Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” Brand loyalty was a way of ensuring the audience stuck with the channel and watched the adverts. Programs were the wrapping paper for the advertisements. Advertisers in a way dictated the kinds of things that could or could not be seen on commercial TV. In the seventies, creating early brand loyalty saw the publication of children’s magazine Look-In in January 1971. Look-In was the equivalent of kids’ TV Guide or as it was known “The Junior TVTimes.” The TVTimes was the rival listing publication to the BBC’s Radio Times. There were basically two broadcasters back then—the BBC which was financed by a compulsory license fee payable by...
Kellar. Thurston. Carter. These names are forgotten to us, but once they motivated throngs of people to attend their mystical performances of occult hoodoo and magic. Their posters are models of the seductive appeal, with their bold names and strange images of impossible creatures. The prominence of the name in these posters is far from accidental—only after years of painstaking labor rising up through the ranks might a magician become one of the select handful whose name alone could draw crowds. Harry Kellar was called the “Dean of American Magicians” and one of his main illusions was the “Levitation of Princess Karnack,” which trick he pilfered from a rival magician by bribing a member of the other guy’s theater staff. He also had a trick that involved decapitating his own head, which would then levitate over the stage. Howard Thurston (it does sound more alluring without the “Howard,” doesn’t it?) was a partner of Kellar’s, a master of tricks involving playing cards. You can see that one of the posters says “THURSTON: KELLAR’S SUCCESSOR.” Thurston eventually did become the best-known magician in America. Charles Joseph Carter perfected the classic “sawing a woman in half”...
Finlay’s cover for the May 1952 issue of Weird Tales Master of exquisitely detailed images that often combined the sexual and the scary, Virgil Finlay was born in Rochester, New York in 1914. He was a highly prolific commercial artist in the midcentury years — one commentator went so far as to call Finlay “the most famous fantasy illustrator of mid-twentieth century.” In his youth during the 1920s, Finlay discovered the magazines Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, which focused on sci-fi and horror, respectively. Once he reached adulthood in the mid-1930s he felt confident enough in his artistic prowess to try to get a position at those journals. Finlay’s mastery of stippling was so advanced that it nearly cost him a job at Weird Tales because his employers weren’t sure that their printing process could reproduce his fine detail, but it turned out that it could. Finlay in 1969 A key medium of Finlay’s was scratchboard, a method that incorporates a white clay coating covered in black ink—the artist scratches the black ink away with a scribe or knife, and the resultant effect is similar to a wood engraving. The technique is called “working from black...
Two years ago, San Diego photographer Edward Honaker was diagnosed with depression—that moment represented the beginning of an arduous process of coming to grips with his own self-defeating tendencies and representing them in his art. As he told the Huffington Post, “All I knew is that I became bad at the things I used to be good at, and I didn’t know why. ... Your mind is who you are, and when it doesn’t work properly, it’s scary.” His self-portraits have a pleasingly elemental quality reminiscent of Magritte or Escher, but with more piercing emotional content than either of those masters. “It’s kind of hard to feel any kind of emotion when you’re depressed, and I think good art can definitely move people,” he said. Honaker, who also has done fashion work for Doc Martens and Armani Exchange, hopes that his project will goad viewers into accepting those who struggle with mental illness. “When I was making the portfolio, I asked myself if I was the kind of person whom others would feel comfortable coming to if they were going through a difficult time and needed someone to talk to,” said Honaker. “Truthfully, at...
“If men found out how to give birth to children they’d never propose again.” - Bette Davis Blank on Blank dug up—and made a short animation to—a delightful taped interview with Bette Davis being interviewed in her home by entertainment columnist Shirley Eder in 1963. Davis cuts through the bullshit and openly speaks her mind about gender roles, sexism in a male dominated workforce and marriage. I think men have got to change an awful lot. I think somehow they still prefer the little woman. They’re just staying way, way behind and so as a rule I think millions of women are very happy to be by themselves, they’re so bored with the whole business of trying to be the little woman, when no such thing really exists anymore. It just simply doesn’t. This world’s gone way beyond it. The real female should be partly male and the real male should be partly female anyway. So if you ever run into that in either sex you’ve run into something very, very fine, I think. Davis’ quick wit and no-nonsense POV makes me love her even more. With thanks to David Gerlach!
The cover artwork by Rowena Morrill for the 1988 edition of Clifford D. Simak’s book ‘Project Pope.’ When Rowena Morrill scored her first book cover as an artist, the year was 1977, and she was one of a scant few women making a name for themselves in the male-dominated world of fantasy and science fiction art. According to the artist, her entrance into the world of fantasy illustration was a happy accident. After relocating to Philadelphia, Morrill found work in a local art gallery taking commissions for customers which mostly consisted of wildlife scenes. Later she would move to New York to work for an ad agency—a gig she detested, prompting her to seek a new job anywhere but there. Ace Books, the highly regarded and longest-running sci-fi publisher in the U.S. gave Morrill a job. The opportunity would result in her artwork appearing in or on over 400 books by authors like Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman’s hero R.A. Lafferty. Morrill’s work also appeared on the cover of National Lampoon, horror staple Creepy, Heavy Metal and was even swiped for the cover of an early demo by Metallica, Power Metal. The painting in question...
From 1976 to the mid-1980’s, Linder Sterling (born Linda Mulvey) was the matriarch and muse of the Manchester, England punk and post-punk music and art scenes. She was part of the mortar that held these scenes together, based somewhat at her home in the Whalley Range area of Manchester. She knew everyone, and apparently inspired nearly everyone she knew. She was the inspiration for The Buzzcocks’ “What Do I Get?” and her long-time BFF Morrissey’s “Cemetery Gates.” She met Morrissey at the soundcheck at The Sex Pistols’ 1976 show in Manchester that Morrissey later described in disappointing terms. He interviewed her for a fanzine in 1979 and she has been a steadfast influence in his life since his pre-Smiths days. But the lovely Linder is more than a muse. She is a musician, pioneering visual artist, and performance artist in her own right. As early as her art school days at Manchester Polytechnic Linder created some of the most recognizable posters, flyers, 45 sleeves, and LP covers in the U.K. music scene. She also created her own art, music (with her band Ludus) and her own much imitated collage style. Ludus was formed by Linder and guitarist Arthur Kadmon,...
Another mark in the “why the Internet rules” column: an Oklahoma college student named Amelia has transcribed the music written on the ass of a figure from the “Hell” panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, and posted a recording of it to her Tumblr. Listen to it here. It’s not the most mind-blowing music you’ll hear in your life, I know, but it’s still wonderful that this was done. There it is. Wonder why it took five centuries before someone played it? Music geeks may have noticed that the staff on the man’s butt (must resist obvious joke) has only four lines. It seems likely that this is an older form of notation used for Gregorian chants. If you’ll indulge a nitpick—on her blog, Amelia calls this “LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell.” Given that most sources hold that the triptych’s completion date was around the year 1500, give or take, it’s much, much closer to about 500 years old. But an error like that is easy enough to ascribe to a slip of the typing finger. If you’re curious to know more...
Every home should have a copy of Bad Little Children's Books.
Not merely sexist, these ads essentially advocate violence against any henpecking harpy who would dare to ask her husband to extinguish his malodorous cheroot. Tune in and experience the acrid, sooty stench of a very different American cultural milieu.
The Butthole Surfers show at Danceteria in early 1986 has become the stuff of legend, but as is often the case, “legends” can be imperfect and are often reported on by someone not even born when the event in question transpired or by someone who didn’t bother to even check a single source other than Wikipedia. Here’s Gibby’s version, as told to Option Magazine in 1993: At the legendary Danceteria in New York during the early days of the Butthole Surfers, Gibby got caught drinking and tripping with his pants down. “Ten minutes into the show, I’d put on ten dresses - you see, I used to put dresses on and then tear ‘em all off,” he explains. “But I’d gotten so trippin’ and so drunk. I forgot to put on my underwear. So I got down to my last dress” - he pauses for a well timed hiccup - “and, goddamn it, I was naked. “I looked over at [band members] Cabbage and Kathleen: Cabbage had come out from behind the drums and she had this Fred Flintstone plastic baseball bat filled with urine and was sprinkling it on the crowd. Kathleen was totally naked...
Strong woman and acobat Louise Leers (aka Luise Krökel), 1930s. Some of the images of the badass strong women in this post date all the way back to the very early 1900s however the female “strong woman” was an attraction as long ago as the early 1700s where women such a the “Female Italian Samson” and the “Little Woman from Geneva” would perform impressive feats of strength such as bearing massive amounts of weight on their backs or effortlessly hoisting several men in their arms. The ‘Great Sandwina’ aka, Katie Brumbach. Sometime in the late 1800s the appearance of strong women became more prevalent in sporting events and were also a common attraction in circuses where they would showcase their superhuman strength. This in turn paved the way for other rule-breaking girls such as female wrestlers and bodybuilders. One of the best known super women was Katie Brumbach called the “Great Sandwina.” Hailing from Vienna, Brumbach’s parents were also circus performers and it would appear that she was the combination of her father (who stood 6’ 6”) and her mother (who was herself a strong woman of sorts, sporting biceps that measured 15 inches around). She not only...
The prospect of catastrophic nuclear war has an interesting effect on the human psyche. My dad used to work for a man named Herman Kahn, who became famous in the early 1960s for writing a book called Thinking About the Unthinkable, which sought to analyze outcomes in which some portion of humanity survived the conflict more or less normally. Kahn’s reward for this was being savagely caricatured in the form of the Groeteschele character played by Walter Matthau in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 drama Fail-Safe. (Just a few months earlier, Kahn, along with Wernher von Braun, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller, became one of the quartet of people that went into the creation of Peter Sellers’ delirious eponym in Stanely Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.) The Reagan years were an interesting time to be terrified of a war between the Russians and the Americans. For whatever reason the year 1983 was the, er, “ground zero” for the trope in pop culture. You had the absolute non plus ultra of “event TV” in ABC’s televised movie The Day After, which on November 20, 1983, imagined a nuclear warhead taking out Lawrence,...
Two years ago, San Diego photographer Edward Honaker was diagnosed with depression—that moment represented the beginning of an arduous process of coming to grips with his own self-defeating tendencies and representing them in his art. As he told the Huffington Post, “All I knew is that I became bad at the things I used to be good at, and I didn’t know why. ... Your mind is who you are, and when it doesn’t work properly, it’s scary.” His self-portraits have a pleasingly elemental quality reminiscent of Magritte or Escher, but with more piercing emotional content than either of those masters. “It’s kind of hard to feel any kind of emotion when you’re depressed, and I think good art can definitely move people,” he said. Honaker, who also has done fashion work for Doc Martens and Armani Exchange, hopes that his project will goad viewers into accepting those who struggle with mental illness. “When I was making the portfolio, I asked myself if I was the kind of person whom others would feel comfortable coming to if they were going through a difficult time and needed someone to talk to,” said Honaker. “Truthfully, at...
