WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Highlights from Wildwood, N.J. - 1994

Amy Lockhart - Shrivelled Creatures and Cut Paper Animations

Amy Lockhart's is a Canadian artist and filmmaker. Her art-brut drawings and paintings are playful, reminiscent of Lee Godie, squishing figures into awkward tube shapes and detailing the fleshy fold-overs. Her most recent animation Walk for Walk continues this grotesquerie into a stream-of-conscious parade of licking, skipping, and merry-making.

"This 16mm film was created using over 1,000 hand painted cut-outs and paper puppets with paper backgrounds. I recorded the sounds in an isolation box I built in my living room, out of cardboard, insulation and drywall." The soundtrack is also an astonishing collage of unexpected Foley sound and warbly electronics. You can view more animations, including her collaborations with Marc Bell, on her blog.

Tonetta777 - Demented Spastic Gyrations

I have no idea...mental breakdown dirty dancing to self-produced jams that sound like a cross between The Pod-era Ween and Right Said Fred. Watch all of Tonetta777's videos on his youtube page. Not necessarily NSFW, but it might creep some people out. 

Lauren Luloff's Mountainous Bed Sheets

Lauren Luloff's current show at Horton & Co. features messy abstracts constructed from bed sheets. Luloff has managed to make abstract painting disgusting...the sheets are mountainous, hard and crusty; resembling mummified skin. The works imply a history of sweat and ooze, sheets that have been left to rot...like a homeless man's bedding, ossified with pigeon shit, abandoned underneath a bridge.

The clean photo documentation at the gallery's website doesn't do the work justice...check out more photos from the Anaba blog. 

Miniature Tableaux of Mark Powell

Mark Powell creates horrific and gory miniature tableaux of hellish interiors occupied by rotted meat monsters. The photo documentation of these little worlds is also impressive as it creates a cinematic narrative while also being very painterly in a Francis Bacon sort of way. His site is here, although I prefer the larger images and simple navigation of his Flickr account.

30 Ways to Electrocution

Old illustrations of electrical accidents from the book Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern! Weeeee!

Mighty Titan, The Most Scary Lovely Dog

 
Sunday treat! Fantastic pictures of a flappy faced Bordeaux Mastiff gnawing and slobbering on a ball!

As an aside, I just spent ten minutes consulting Google on the proper capitalization of dog breed names. I can't find a definitive answer as it seems to be a case of style, so I decided to capitalize the whole damn thing because this goddamn dog deserves it. Look at him.

My Name is Rar-Rar

My Name is Rar-Rar was a spastic no-wave band from Chicago that was formed in late 2000 by guitarist Chuck Falzone and bassist Jonathan Hischke. Both had served time in various incarnations of the Flying Luttenbachers and they brought the dissonance and speed to My Name is Rar-Rar, setting it to a more playful dancey tribal thump provided by Chrissy Rossettie.  Falzone's odd guitar timbre collided with Hischke's ridiculous synth-bass lines that snaked between rubbery farts and calliope bounce.

Original singer Camilla Ha, later of Magic is Kuntmaster, made the stage shows a surrealist fanfare as she fronted the band in elaborate and absurd Victorian-inspired costumes. She liked to assault the audience if they seemed too stuffy and pretentious, other times she stood motionless as she wailed her Nico-like croon over the manic music.

When Ha left the band, Greg Peters took over on vocals, bringing his trademark bark over from his previous band Xerobot.  His whoops, coughs and delusional ramblings transformed the band into a speeding circus caravan that misses a turn and goes tumbling over a cliff. Peters' on-stage antics were also always something to behold as he flailed about, cupping the mic to his mouth and gripping the side of his leg as if his bowels were on the verge of bursting.

My Name is Rar-Rar released a split 7" with Neon Hunk on Hello Pussy/Liquid Death Records, a comp track on White Denim records and a mini-EP on an obscure Italian label. They recorded their first record in 2003 but broke up before mixing it. Recently Chuck Falzone unearthed some of the rough mixes and here they are:

Rockin' Bowl | One | Hounds | Look Sharp and Listen | Chrissy's Song | Ass to Ass | Pickles | Mr. Deer

Chuck Falzone and Greg Peters have a new band called Buck Pig. Jonathan Hischke went on to play in the more easily digestible Head of Femur before moving to California to play in a touring line-up of Hella. Chrissy Rossettie moved to Brooklyn and has a dancey futuristic noise project called Iyaxia.

Thanks to Chuck Falzone for letting me put up the tracks and sending me info and photos.

Hilfe, Hilfe, Die Globolinks!

Help! Help! The Globolinks! Is a science-fiction opera for children by Gian Carlo Menotti where strange alien creatures can only be destroyed by music. The Globolinks in this German production look like they stepped out of a Matta painting. They are accompanied by some fantastic and bizarre electronic blip-blop squeeling which adds a nice contract to the neoclassical fanfare. Youtube version here.

My Life in Bagels

The smell of bagels is permanently lodged in my olfactory memory bank.  It is a smell that I have been neglected of since I moved to Chicago from New Jersey years ago. A few months ago my girlfriend brought home some bagels. I had grown to loathe bagels and I ignored the bag she plopped on the kitchen table...thinking it was a batch of Chicago bagels...essentially an inedible and tasteless mass of Wonderbread shaped in an "O". But soon a familiar smell wafted pass my nose...a smell that brought back waves of memories and a healthy rumble in my stomach...those are BAGELS! REAL BAGELS! It is a very distinctive smell- doughy, slightly sweet and always accompanied by the scent of a well-worn paper bag.

I have a very nostalgic and emotional relationship to bagels. In high school I had a group of girlfriends that worked at my town's bagel shop (they only hired teenage girls).  It was a dumpy little strip mall storefront that just had the bare essentials- bins of bagels, a couple pots of coffee and a small deli case for lox, cream cheese and butter. Customers rarely came in- giving us free reign of the place to use as our little clubhouse.  Every day after school I would hang out and stock up on bagels...breeding a ridiculous fanaticism. I always had a paper bag of them in my backpack, eating them as I spent hours roaming around town and exploring the woods. Pumpernickel! Sesame Seed! Even a plain bagel was enough for me. I ate at least five bagels a day. A surplus would often accumulate in my school locker, many of them hardening into a concrete that would smash into many pieces when you threw them against the wall.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Chicago and bit into the region's bagel! A bagel shop underneath the El tracks by Wrigley Field came highly recommended and I immediately hopped on the train to hunt it down. Unfortunately, what my mouth was greeted with was a puffy and elastic ball of dough. I should have known better when I saw that they offered chocolate chip, blueberry and pumpkin varieties. A bagel is not a muffin! A bagel is not simply a surface to smear cream cheese upon! A bagel is the product of a highly refined recipe and cooking process passed down through hundreds of years- resulting in a bread product whose flavor is rich but simple and a texture that is always challenging. I don't need a goddamn thing on my bagel and honestly, I find bagels most delicious when they are a couple days old and slightly hard.

P-R-A-W-D-A

From what I can tell, P-R-A-W-D-A is a duo of Russian women who create site specific performances in costume. Super-heroes, bunny costumes, plush headpieces- these are images that have been beaten to death in western hipster art...but P-R-A-W-D-A's approach seems more ritualistic, sexual and defeated. In their wonderful photo documentation, they arrange themselves symmetrically as in icon paintings, holding stoic stances even though their uniforms are bizarre concoctions seemingly picked out of the garbage.

Hausu: Surreal Japanese Horror

Manga, Vienna Aktion, weird experimental optical printing and a white cat collide for the most insane two and a half minutes I have ever seen. The entire film can be viewed on Youtube here.

(via Wheat)

Blagojevich!

Living in Chicago, I have been obsessed with Rod Blagojevich ever since his campaign posters plastered the city years ago. Like Gefilta Fish, it's a name I love to repeat over and over again...BLA-GOY-A-VICH...BLAG-OYA-VICH...BLA-GO-YAV-ICH. It's an ugly word that rolls around the mouth like a pair of soiled underwear, tumbling around your tongue and throat until you suffocate in glottal spasms.

...and of course the fluffy hair helmet, the creepy grin, the hilariously coarse Chicago accent...and this picture from my friend Andy Beaman.

Funky Forest / Sax Playing Walrus / Pillow Love Smooth Jams

Here is a very odd Japanese film, Funky Forest. Fans of Cronenberg and Svankmeyer will enjoy the surreal and hilarious body horror of this clip. From what I have seen on Youtube, the rest of this movie is pretty dull and unwatchable. Speaking of body horror, continue reading...

Marsh's Free Museum

Marsh's Free Museum in Long Beach, Washington features many monstrous taxidermy oddities such as the Devil Fish and Jake the Alligator boy. Also crammed into the claustrophobic confines are musical cabinets, the largest collection of glass fishing balls and a cast iron sausage stuffer.

Flickr set 2 / Flickr set 2 / Roadside America Entry

Mommie Dearest Fashion Spread

Avant-fashion blog Foto Decadent has high quality scans of a very creepy Mommy Dearest inspired fashion spread that was featured in an issue of Numéro magazine.

Renee Adams' Mutations

Renee Adams' sculptures are biological mutations. Like the drawings of Jim Woodring or Ernst Haeckel- there is a playfulness about the abject alien nature of these life forms. 

Work can be viewed here and here.

Complicated Horse Emergency and Egg Baloney Pardon Me Calypso Germ Food Mumu

Drew Ziegler is a local Chicago weirdo who has been staging absurdist puppet shows and performances in basements and underground galleries for years. An expert garbage collector, Drew assembles his props, sets and puppets out of trash. Sometimes he aims for the delicate and beautiful- such as his meditative shadow puppet plays and mechanical puppet machines...and then turns 360 degrees to create crude and overwhelming messy masses of junk and shit. But Drew's Dada aesthetic is always apparent throughout every project as he creates post-apocalyptic nonsense worlds where trash rains down from the heavens to crush its malformed inhabitants that squirt viscous discharge at each other.

For the past couple years Drew has been traveling from Chicago to LA, Oakland and New Orleans collaborating with different people. Originally concieved in Oakland, Egg Baloney Pardon Me Calypso Germ Food Mumu is a performance of a supposed sitcom where the actors lip-sync their Dada-babble dialogue from a pre-recorded soundtrack. The characters are repulsive and idiotic, like an updated pop culture Ubu Roi. Everything is random: business men enter, a baby is birthed, food is dumped on a disembodied head in the middle of a table...yet it is all scripted within the soundtrack, working off of sound cues of car horns and goat bleating.

This is a video of Episode 2 of Egg Baloney Pardon Me Calypso Germ Food Mumu entitled "Roaches for Nerf Pubes in Soccer Mom Tom-Tom Bomb!". It was performed in Chicago at Reversible Eye Gallery. I was recruited last minute to play the baby, which required me to flail around a bit and hump a garbage bag for the duration of the show. Don't play the video if a grown man in a diaper humping a garbage bag upsets your co-workers. The entire performance can be viewed here.

Complicated Horse Emergency is Drew's collaboration with Randall Christopher Bailey where they expand on Egg Boloney... and transform an entire space into their absurdist fevered dreams of garbage that is accumulated into giant ornate piles. Characters appear and recite random nonsense monologues related to dog testicles and hot dogs. The action is more open ended and the audience usually tumbles into the set in drunken revelry.

Here is the Complicated Horse Emergency soundtrack.  Chicago analog synth and Der Plan enthusiast Beau Wanzer writes the boing-splat-fart jams while Drew and Randall lay down the dog testicle testimonials.

part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

Unfortunately, there isn't any great visual documentation of these events...only this youtube video.

Drew Ziegler is now in New Orleans working on his Scary Toesies puppet shows with longtime collaborator Jamie Kalel. They will be performing on Halloween and at the New Orleans' Fringe Festival in November.

Frank Magnotta

Frank Magnotta creates beautiful graphite drawings that deal with accumulation, mass and space. Aggregations of logos and empty phrases congeal into massive blocks of architecture. His ridiculous portraits are based on the same blocky forms. 

The Genius of Arrigo Barnabé

I have been obsessed with Brazillian musician Arrigo Barnabé ever since his song Clara Crocodilo was posted to On the Download a few years ago. The song was like nothing I had ever heard before- from the spastic Portuguese ranting to the atonal horn arrangements and joyous sounding female vocals. Every element of the song was so skewed in such a precise way. Fortunately, I was able to find the entire out-of-print album on Soulseek. It's a masterpiece that doesn't let up- a mix of Rock In Opposition, Zappa, Ornette Coleman, Magma and Brazilian pop.

Since Youtube first made its appearance, I have been searching weekly for Barnabé videos. A few videos finally popped up last year-  they were short clips of poor quality that caught Barnabé  playing the piano during  a reunion concert of his brother's post-punk outfit Patife Band. This was enough for me though...I had built Barnabé up in my head to such monumental proportions that it made my week to find a grainy little video clip of him performing. Over time, more Barnabé videos surfaced- all great little Barnabé morsels...but nothing from the late seventies/early eighties when he would have been performing Clara Crocodilo with a full band.

Until last week- finally! Someone uploaded a video of a 1979 performance of the Clara Crocodilo album. The renditions are a little looser than the album versions, but the energy is maniacle and off kilter. It was everything I imagined in my head during repeated listens of Clara Crocodillo- a festive dance of misfits, demons and pretty ladies with Barnabé as the ringleader. Now if I only knew Portuguese so I knew what the hell he was jabbering on about!

...Song starts about two minutes in. The possessed look on the female singer's face is amazing. Youtube version is here. Part 2 is here.

Barnabe has been active since the late seventies and has produced bizarre narrative concept albums, usually writing in a twelve-tone technique. Here is a brief sampling of gems from his catalogue...

Num Antro Sujo from A Saga de Clara Crocodilo
From a live 1999 version of Clara Crodilo which includes more strings than horns and slightly different arrangements.

Tubarões Voadores from Tubarões Voadores
Another highly inventive early record which revolves around the narrative of a flying shark. Some of this material goes into a Residents or Der Plan territory at times.

Dedo de Deus (com vânia bastos) from Suspeito
An odd foray into more late 80s dance and pop territory. Totally bombastic.

Miolo Mole from Gigante Negão
A late 90s return to his earlier sound

There were some efforts into more traditional sounds, although Barnabé's unique sense of melody always shines through. His most recent album, Missa In Memorian Itamar Assumpção, is a clasical composition dedicated to late Brazillian musician Itamar Assumpção, Barnabe's cohort in the Vanguard Paulista movement. Clips of the recording of this piece can be found here. You can hear tracks of the album from Barnabé's Myspace page here. More stuff can be found at his intentionally hard to navigate site here.