WFMU's Beware of the Blog

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.

Luxurious Domestic Garbage Pit

"We had a resident who had an outstanding balance for over a month and no one could get ahold of her. The Bookkeeper went inside after so many tries to leave a note and this is what we found..."

4 Faces of Foofaraw

4 Faces of Foofaraw is a show opening in Germany featuring the work Femke Hiemstra, Heiko Müller,
Anthony Pontius, and Fred Stonehouse. Lots of great reproductions of their work...especially exciting is finally having a decent archive of Fred Stonehouse work on the web.

Sixo - More Demented Portraits of Humanity!

French illustrator Sixo's pen and ink drawings combine the demented pathos of Raymond Pettibon and Charles Burns. It seems he only has a Myspace page, but there are plenty of drawings there...thankfully presented in an organized layout.

Pimply Teenagers! The Photography of Lyndon Wade

I have seen Lyndon Wade's (nsfw) photography before in big magazines and print ads but I was only reminded of it  again when I stumbled on a Russian blog featuring his portraits of pimply teenagers...my favorite comment of the blog being, "There are mutants in the American settlements".

Guinea Pig Festival in Peru

The one-day festival includes an animal show and fashion contest which features the guinea pig, Then dinner is served.

The Cartoon Dada of Massimo Giacon

Since the early 80s, Massimo Giacon has been at the center of an Italian cartoon renaissance, producing cartoons, illustrations and designs for Italian magazines such as "Frigidaire", "Alter", "Dolce Vita", "Cyborg" and "Nova Express". I originally came across the work of Giacon when I was trying to find information on the 80s dada/synth/noise group Spirocheta Pergoli, of which he is the founding member. I was glad to find an inventive artist whose playful but grotesque visual work is a perfect companion to his strange and ridiculous music.

Unfortunately, Giacon doesn't have a proper website, but you can view some work at his MySpace page, which also includes musical projects from the last ten years. Images from his 2001 solo show Philosophers in the Pop Planet can be viewed here.

I had posted the Spirocheta Pergoli EP on Cake & Polka Parade a couple years ago but here they are again if you missed them.

Spirocheta Pergoli - Fuzzi Bugsi Tumpa il Bongo
a1 - Merendine | a2 - Pistole Giocattolo | b1 - Pianto di un Coniglio a Molla | b2 - Fuzzi Bugsi

Matt Marsden- Junk Aesthete

Even though my friend and former roommate Matt Marsden lives around the corner, I rarely see him these days. We have both become workaholic hermits and rarely leave our apartments. Occasionally I make it over to his place about every six months and he bombards me with his latest record and book aquisitions as well as the new treasures he has pulled out of the trash. Matt is a lifelong garbage collector- not a mentally deranged packrat piling fecal encrusted newspapers to the ceiling but rather a junk aesthete. All of his garbage "bits", as he likes to call them, are meticulously arranged throughout his apartment...animal skulls, toys, rusty mechanical parts, old bottles, shriveled potatoes with attached wigs occupy every square inch of wall space. It's a wonderful claustrophobic museum packed into a typical Chicago apartment, although even the facade of the building is unique for the area's streetscape. Resembling a miniature castle, complete with turrets and balconies, the building was originally a fire house. I have been meaning to take pictures of Matt's apartment and write something about it for a couple months now but I was only able to get over to his place again on the 4th of July- his rooftop is one of the highest in Humboldt Park, making for a great  360 degree viewing of the city's fireworks.

I have moved Matt's museum of garbage a few times. I lived with Matt for six years in three different places. I met him through a mutual friend and we instantly bonded over a shared love of Lenny Dee records. We were both looking for a new place at the time so we moved into the garden apartment of a house in Wicker Park. As soon as Matt hauled his boxes in, he immediately went to work nailing his bits to the walls. I was still in school and living out of a few boxes of crap, a minimalist by necessity because I moved every six months, so I was amazed at the amount of stuff that soon filled the apartment. I was an occasional trash picker but I never truly had the patience for it and I certainly didn't have the obsessive mind that Matt had in approaching garbage. Every bit had a story, every bit was meticulously arranged in a shadow box like a Joseph Cornell piece.  It was a scientific organization that resembled some sort of cellular chaos. It was inspiring.

Masked girls bearing bouquets, plastic animals strapped to their heads, roaming around in a field of donkeys

This odd photo comes from the Monkeyabout image blog. It's almost a Henry Darger drawing come to life.

Here are some strange Flickr sets and image blogs that I have had bookmarked for a while.

Modern Fred's Flickr Photosets - 60s pop, fashion, illustration, pulp covers and Kaiju Eiga.

Craft of Lady Hairdressing - hair sculptures attached to lady heads!

Dr, Odio's Flickr Photosets - comics, sexploitation, Munsters and covers of an odd Spanish comic called "Killing".

Agence Eureka's Flickr Photosets - quirky French magazine illustration from the 40s, anatomy illustration from the 30s and way too much more

N A S D A Q F O R E V E R (NSFW) - random assortment of weirdness

Vintage Girly Mags (NSFW) - grandpa's entire porn stash of curvy ladies is presented in high resolution JPG!

Public Collectors

Public Collectors, an archive project led by Chicago artist Marc Fischer, consists of informal agreements where collectors allow the contents of their collection to be published and permit those who are curious to directly experience the objects in person.

In addition to hosting collection inventories, Public Collectors also includes digital archives of out-of-print publications, relics of the pre-internet music underground and random ephemera such as a collection of "do not disturb" signs.

Some highlights of the digital archive include:

A self-published collection of stories and illustrations by Michael Gira that was only available on the Swans' 1997 tour.

A collection of children's graffiti from antique sources

Transcripts and audio documentation of conversations with a developmentally disabled man about music, split LPs and Super Nanny.

Issue #19 of French artist Bruno Richard's Elles Sont De Sortie- an insane, beautiful and obscene art magazine published in the early 80s with Pascal Doury. In addition to Richard's early work, Public Collectors also includes a show catalog from an exhibit curated by Marc Fischer that documented nine years of mail correspondence between Richard and Fischer.

All publications are provided as high quality PDFs suitable for printing. I did not provide the direct links because I want you to pretend like its old times and dig around a bit.

Ludovic Levasseur's Flesh Dolls

Ludovic Levasseur's Poupees Viandes (headstock meats?) series features the cutest and most disgustingly grotesque flesh dolls. The portraits above are only a small sampling of the wasted flesh and deformation. View all dolls at his Flickr gallery.

link via Monster Brains

Blooming Dog Diva Sculptures of David Hevel

David Hevel creates wonderfully gaudy sculptures of pop star divas by combining taxidermy forms and chaotic heaps of plastic flower arrangements. The divas cannibalize each other in a mad torrent of spurting jewels and whispy blonde wigs.

Grotesque Expressionism of André Ethier

Toronto based artist André Ethier's paint is fat, quick and energetic. Ethier manages to refine a crude and wide expressionistic brush stroke into an elegant form defining mass. His colors at times vibrate with a vomit-inducing Van Gogh palette while his figures strike twisted German Expressionism poses.