WFMU's Beware of the Blog

From SCREW to Screamin' Jay and Beyond: The Comic Art of Avi Spivak

"That's probably the hardest I've worked on any project," says Avi Spivak, the illustrator behind Norton Records' recent issue of Kicksville Confidential.  And if you've seen Kicksville, released this past October, you'll understand what he means by "hard work" -- the Brooklyn-based artist's painstaking renderings of Norton stars are as detailed as they are funny, and they're clearly the toil of someone with a deep interest in u-ground comics and gutsy r'n'r alike.  In Spivak's enthusiastic scrawl -- part Kaz, part MAD, part G. Panter, part urban daydrunk stupor -- some of the Norton stable's more colorful tales come to life, and we see, for example, Hannibal's fabled ride through Midtown Manhattan on an elephant, a Screamin' Jay Hawkins/Esquerita street-level fistfight and Hasil Adkins's rural shootout.

Spivak's resume prior to Kicksville is no less impressive.  In addition to commercial art and various other projects, like the mural he painted outside of the now-defunct Mars Bar, he's contributed to Maximum RocknRoll, The Scientist, Vice -- and Al Goldstein's SCREW, for which he illustrated a cover in 2006.

FOOD (1972) – Gordon Matta-Clark's Restaurant – Directed by Robert Frank

FOOD is a short film directed by aritst/photographer Robert Frank about Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden's conceptual restaurant. Founded in 1972 in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, FOOD brought together many factors of the local community, artists and otherwise, becoming a space for dialogue and conversation as well as a living piece in it of itself. 

The Only Way You Can Get Relief Is To Get A Shot Of Diddley

Apropos of nothing but to get the police off the streets by nine o'clock, here's sixty-six minutes of The Originator, Bo Diddley, seen here with friends Jerome Green, The Duchess, Chuck Berry and himself, Bo Diddley:

 

The Pope of Trash: John Waters

by Whitney Weiss

Talk Show - John Waters

See more on Network Awesome

When I was 22, I was lured to Provincetown (once a thriving hotbed of underground artists and cultural revolutionaries, now home to condominiums and dogs in strollers) by the promise of relatively easy money and the opportunity to meet my favorite living director, John Waters, who spends his summers there. When the film festival brought Jane Lynch and Gael Garcia Bernal to town, I kept my eye on the prize: a man whose own twenties were spent living in a treehouse and having sex in the town cemetery, activities that seemed to have been replaced by the current crop of twenty-somethings with shopping at Marc Jacobs and fucking in the gym.

While the money never came that summer, a chance to speak with The Pope of Trash did. One balmy evening, he and his boyfriend were sitting on a bench in Town Square while I walked by on my way to

70,000 Tons: Metal Mutiny 2012 Edition

1 cruise ship, 4 days, 42 bands, 2,000 fans! Yes, I had to do it again! 70,000 Tons of Metal, 2012! I had such a great time last year that I had to go for a reprise and see what would happen! I've got a photo album here with many more photos, and this entry is the companion to my radio show, airing Thursday Feb 2nd at noon. When the archive is posted, it will be linked here.

It's true, I had a lot of prior experience, so I had already been on the same ship, Royal Caribbean's Majesty of the Seas, and knew my way around. The weather I was leaving was not nearly as horrendous as it was last year, but I was still looking forward to punishing my ears and my body for a possible 84 sets of music in 4 days. I arrived in Miami a day early to trek up to Ft. Lauderdale with one of my partners in crime for a Cannibal Corpse show, and to also pick up another partner in crime to head back to Miami. Why not get an early start on bludgeoning my senses? I have to admit we did find time to view a certain sporting event involving a NY team that day also. On to the cruise! Last year I never noticed how much was loaded onto the boat via crane; the pool stage was composed mostly of large items, let alone all the rigging, backline, etc. I watched the crane pluck pieces off the ground and onto Deck 11 for hours on Monday morning.

 

A Joy Division in Nazi Disneyland

Last week the web was wriggling with outrage over The Disney Store Corporation offering for sale a Mickey Mouse™ T-shirt in the graphic style of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures albumcover -- not that the iconic white-on-black waveform image (plucked from the Cambidge Encyclopedia of Astronomy by drummer Stephen Morris) was any stranger to absurd marketing schemes.

 

Glenn Beck / The Invisible Committee

Oldie but Goodie

Collaboration between Glenn Beck and The Invisible Committee

- - -

Glenn Beck lives and works in Dallas, TX

You can purchase The Coming Insurrection here

E.S.P. TV #11 / "New Dance City" Special with Mutual Dreaming

In case you missed it Sunday night on Manhattan cable access (MNN), E.S.P. TV #11 is now online. The hour long special was taped at Mutual Dreaming's "New Dance City" party (organized by Aurora Halal) at 285 Kent over Halloween weekend and features performances by Vidrio (ex-Ultradyne) and Steve Summers with possibly you or someone you know dancing to DJs Meridian 7 (also known for her modular synths), Ron Morelli (head of L.I.E.S.), and Traxx (prolific Chicago-based turntablist, producer, and owner of Nation Records)...

See it and past episodes at the E.S.P. TV Vimeo channel here: vimeo.com/channels/esptv

The next live public taping is Feb 18th, 8-12 at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn. Lineup for that night includes MV Carbon and C Spencer Yeh, Grasshopper, and Little Women with video by Amanda Long and the E.S.P. TV team. More info here 

The Curse of Brando Island

The ghastly Spectres which were doomed at last
To tell as true a tale of dangers past, 
As ever the dark annals of the deep
Disclosed for man to dread or woman weep. 

-- The Island, Lord Byron

In 1960, while on a scouting journey for locations for Mutiny On The Bounty, Marlon Brando visits the atoll Tetiaroa and falls in love with the former home of Tahitian royalty. Two years later, Brando marries his second Mutiny co-star, Tarita Teriipia, who played his Polynesian wife in the film and purchases Tetiaroa for $200,000 with the intention of making it his home. Little did Brando know what his island paradise would bring he and his visitors, for in acting, one not only brings himself to a role, but the role can transform the actor's real personality, permenantly -- a most dangerous game for friends and family of the 'Godfather' and 'Colonel Kurtz'.

TV Is the Government: The Underground Vaudeville of TV Party

By Gabriella Arrigoni - Collection: TV Party

Watch more on Network Awesome

Not always, actually quite seldom, is the distinction between art and absurdity a relevant one. And it certainly doesn’t matter when in a TV show you combine live music, in-studio party, fancy dress, videotapes, punk, disco, anarchism, new wave, visual arts, rap, interviews, phone-in sessions, shaky camera angles, crude advertising and live drug taking. All this featuring guests such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Lurie, David Byrne, George Clinton, Fab Five Freddy, Tuxedo Moon, Debbie Harry, Maripol, Iggy Pop, Chris Burden, John Feckner just to name a few. The uniqueness of TV Party, however, was not as a celebration of the apotheosis of the underground, but that this played out on the mass media it rebelled against.

File Under: Boo, Hooray, Boo-Hooray, Art, Not Art, Books

Next Wednesday, Jan. 18, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., the Boo-Hooray Gallery will open its latest/greatest exhibition, Artists' Book Not Artists' Book, an oddball showcase of books artistic, non- and all manner in-between.

For the unfamiliar, Boo-Hooray is the brainchild of kingpin rec collector and art aficionado Johan Kugelberg; he and cohort Jeremy Sanders (of 6 Decades Books) have co-curated the exhibit.  Artists' Book Not Artists' Book promises an array of curious tomes by the likes of Richard Meltzer, William Gibson, Richard Hell and Ed Ruscha, to name but a sampling, and judging from the gallery's previous shows -- displays of Ed Wood's paperback smut, photos and art relative to the Velvet Underground, Crass-related fanzines, etc. -- this one will be another doozy, even (or especially!) if you can't read.

All and sundry are welcome to stop by the gallery's space in Manhattan, 265 Canal Street (6th floor), where the show will run from Jan. 18 to Feb. 12, much to the delight and confusion of artists and philistines alike.  Those wishing to RSVP for the opening should do so here. 

Yvonne Rainer "Hand Movie" (1966)

 

Niall McClelland

A Conver-view with Alexandra Gorczynski

It's another month of life.

Last week I had a conversation online with Philadelphia based artist Alexandra Gorczynski about her work.

I discovered her through Hologram City, an incredibly engaging curatorial project she does.
The images she posts range from the hopeless, to the grotesque, to the violent, to the explicit, to the materialistic, to the humorous.

To really get the 'full experience', check out her work before you read the interview.  Thank you.  Oh and here's to hoping you enjoy her work as much as I do.  Thank you

FUN Go! America! Celebrates New Jersey, on My Castle of Quiet, 12.18.2011

FUN—as I've come to know the Philadelphia-based combo, its sounds and membership, I realize how truly appropriate the name is for what they do. FUN are able to apply clever, inventive, fresh ideas to their improvised music-making, minus all the beard-stroking and pretentious, high-minded, music-conservatory-based conceptualization and back-patting that often accompanies similar activities.

For their FUN Go! America! tour, a 50-year project that involves one performance a year, each in a different state, on the very date that that state was inducted into the Union, FUN came to New Jersey on December 18th, to WFMU's Studio B, to render two unique, smartly conceived and individually distinct long-form improvisations. The concept of the tour alone is staggering, and relies upon FUN's members having access to interstate transportation, and living long enough, to execute the mass concept in its entirety.

 

Erika Keck

 

There's A Super Genius In All Of Us

In February of 1990, I xeroxed 2 pages of the New Yorker magazine, to hold onto what I considered one of the funniest pieces of writing ever. It was titled Coyote V. Acme and was penned by regular New Yorker writer and NJ resident, Ian Frazier. In a nutshell, and I'll post part of it after the jump, Wile E. Coyote, plaintiff sues the Acme Company for product liability and the injuries he sustained over his career at Warner Brothers Entertainment. It's written in legalese and describes so well some of the cartoons and shenanigans involved, that you'll be able to be there with Mr. Coyote when he endures a violent feet-first collision with a boulder. Frazier published a book bearing the same name in 1996; a collection of his short humorous pieces, and has other books to his name, some humor collections like Coyote V. Acme, others full length adventures. I was reminded of the original piece the other day and wanted to share some of it, since it's been sitting xeroxed in my file cabinet in the FUN folder for decades. Ian's books are available through several online retailers. This time of year can be one of reflection and I'd like to look at the attempts of Mr. Coyote to capture his prey over the years, and the purity of his actions. Wile E. Coyote; Genius, and at some point in the Roadrunner cartoons, upgraded to Super Genius, was dedicated and single minded. He'd have made a great employee at the time of his upswing into the public eye. He was inventive beyond belief, and even when the same item would malfunction three radically different ways, he would remain a loyal customer of the Acme Company. Brick and mortars would die for a shopper like him! He is a reminder to all of us that perseverance and hard work pays off, or at least keeps you gainfully employed, and that there's a super genius lying in wait inside all of us. Perhaps it just takes an anvil to the head!  There was a response to the article published in 1995, I'm not certain of the source, which more or less takes the stand that since our beloved Mr. Coyote quite often looked directly at the camera before sustaining injuries that the Acme Company's products caused, that he was faking the extent of his physical damage. Imagine that!

A Germs Whisky Christmas: Cruising For Oki-Dogs

December 23, 1979, Germs play the Masque Christmas Ball at Whisky-Au-Go-Go, performing what would be dubbed on-stage "art" by singer Darby Crash, self-proclaimed "Manimal" and possessor of "television and supervision," who read "every Bible story," and was educated in mind-control by public school Scientologists, an A+ hustler whose world-famous catchphrase was "buy me a beer" and whose demands for "beer and damage" do not go unheeded this night. Watch as Darby, spolight directly in his eyes, eats a lit book of matches, transforms into a panther, demands each audience member "hit the person next to you," sets fire to his (A+) lyrics (balls-on-fire-great teenage Blake) all before guitarist Pat Smear kicks a bouncer in the head (several times+) for crossing number one invisible line in rock n roll: the artists own the stage.

Zak Prekop

My Favorite Thrift-Store Demos

Tony Coulter here, with another stack of cassettes. This time 'round, I've sampled my favorite thrift-store demos -- or more accurately, I suppose, my favorite demo cassettes found in thrift stores. I didn't know what any of them were when I bought them, over the years, but each has something special. As an added bonus, I've also given you a few favorite thrift-store LP jackets at the end of the post.