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Everything you need to know about the Frank Zappa auction
10.11.2016
09:52 am
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“Auction House to the Stars” Julien’s has announced a large sale of items from the estate of the late cult rocker/social provocateur Frank Zappa and his wife Gail, the trustee of his legacy who herself passed away a year ago this week. Besides revealing a surprisingly gaudy decorating sensibility, the auction is typical rock star fare—paintings of and by the deceased musician, gold and platinum records and other sales awards, clothing, jewelry, and other ephemera that for some reason people want to possess. And of course there are some pretty tasty guitars in the offing—including an Acoustic Control Corporation Black Widow, a very rare guitar that made news about a year ago when Jimi Hendrix’s was the object of a lawsuit. But the items that make this auction truly noteworthy in our opinion are the original assemblage sculpture that served as the cover art of Burnt Weeny Sandwich, the set of apparently one-of-a-kind Zappa portrait matryoshka dolls
 

I kinda REALLY WANT these.

…and the dozen lots (324-335) of Bruce Bickford claymation figures used to make the brain-eatingly lysergic animated sequences in the classic Baby Snakes concert film.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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10.11.2016
09:52 am
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Zappa meets claymation in the wonderful VHS rarity ‘The Amazing Mr. Bickford’
04.10.2015
12:02 pm
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Many Frank Zappa fans will be familiar with the strange and delightful work of animator Bruce Bickford—his are the claymation sequences in Baby Snakes that you fast-forward through the concert footage to see. Zappa was Bickford’s best-known patron for most of the ‘70s, and his work is featured in the “City of Tiny Lights” and The Dub Room Special videos, but the motherlode of Bickford/Zappa work came in the form of a one-hour VHS compilation released in 1987 called The Amazing Mr. Bickford, which bafflingly has never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray. Bickford’s dizzying stream-of-dementia, anything-can-happen-next, constantly mutating stop-motion animations are scored by Zappa’s orchestral work, culled mostly from Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger, though “Mo ‘n Herb’s Vacation” from London Symphony Orchestra is present, as well.

Here’s a bit of background from a wonderful piece on Bickford that ran in The Quietus:

Bickford was a Vietnam veteran whose love for animation sprung out his crude home movies. His earliest experiments involved toy cars, but a need to populate these rough little films led to the creation of tiny clay figures. Soon enough he was letting his imagination spill out with strange, ever-morphing stream of consciousness tales that seemed to revolve around demons and animal heads, hamburgers and pizzas, treacherous landscapes and excessive violence – “danger and weirdness”, in Bickford’s own words. Audiences were given an early taste when The Old Grey Whistle Test aired a portion of ‘City Of Tiny Lights’ with animated accompaniment in 1979. Baby Snakes made its debut during the Christmas of that year, containing more examples and a peak of behind-the-scenes amidst the concert footage.

One of the Baby Snakes snippets involves a castle that “would make a great disco” but leads to the creation of monsters. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense, though maybe that’s missing the point. The immediacy is what matters, and the fact that these films have the potential to go absolutely anywhere from one moment to the next. They are also clearly the product of a single mind (and single-mindedness), despite Zappa nabbing director credits on The Amazing Mr. Bickford compilation and the ‘City of Tiny Lights’ promo. In a way, Bickford is an outsider artist doing his own thing at his own pace, and was simply fortunate enough to have Zappa serve as a momentary sugar daddy.

Such are the working methods and approach to narrative that very little final product has actually been released. The Amazing Mr. Bickford and Baby Snakes made use of snippets with little or no attempt to explain or understand; they unfold beneath Zappa instrumentals and just exist, nothing more. Bickford returned to his Seattle basement in 1980 and has carried on obsessing ever since. MTV commissioned some idents and a half-hour film, Prometheus’ Garden, was completed in 1987, but otherwise he toils away with seemingly little end in sight.

‘The Amazing Mr. Bickford’ and more, after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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04.10.2015
12:02 pm
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The entire town of Twin Peaks sculpted in clay
11.14.2014
11:04 am
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Laura Palmer (RIP), Leland Palmer/BOB and Ronette Pulaski.
 
Frank Zappa fans among you will likely recognize the name of Bruce Bickford, the animator whose painstaking claymation accompanied Zappa’s music in Baby Snakes and The Amazing Mr. Bickford. Well, it comes as news to me that Bickford is a fellow Twin Peaks obsessive. He has sculpted the entire town in clay, along with some key scenes from the series and movie. In the Twin Peaks-themed gallery at Bickford’s website, a clay Leland carries Laura Palmer’s plastic-wrapped corpse out of the railroad car, and a clay Cooper steps into a miniature Glastonberry Grove.
 

Agent Cooper enters Glastonberry Grove en route to the Black Lodge.
 

Norma serves pie and coffee at the Double R.
 

 

“She’s dead, wrapped in plastic…”
 

The whole fucking town!

In the short clip below, Bickford says that his interest in the Twin Peaks story began with the Green River serial murders:

In my story file, I’ve got way over 150 stories in various stages of development, and up in the front corner here there’s a number of Green River stories. I started working on those stories back in the ‘80s, when the Green River murders were still unsolved. Gradually, it became three different stories, kind of a trilogy, and as it went along, when the Twin Peaks show came on TV, I started to realize there were some of the same characters in that, like the detective, Cooper. I have a character in the Green River stories called Copland. I changed the name a little bit, but it’s the same guy, basically.

 

 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.14.2014
11:04 am
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The phatasmagorical claymation of Bruce Bickford
12.10.2010
02:38 pm
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Hard to fathom that none of us has put together a Bruce Bickford post before now, but here ‘tis. Like most geeky nerds, I was first introduced to the entirely stupendous and obsessively detailed, not to mention extremely demented claymation of Bruce Bickford via his extended sequences in Frank Zappa’s late 70’s concert film Baby Snakes. There’s also an excellent doumentary film about the man, Monster Road  which I couldn’t more highly recommend. Here then is a batch of excerpts from Bickford’s huge and ever growing body of work. This stuff’ll inform your dreams after you see it for better or worse. The complexity herein is truly staggering and more than likely, highly unhealthy. But like most unhealthy things, it’s fucking fun !
 

 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Brad Laner
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12.10.2010
02:38 pm
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