Krist Novoselic’s band after Nirvana, Sweet 75, opened for L7 on their tour for The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum. Novoselic cast L7 as the stars of his surrealistic Super 8 tour movie, L7: The Beauty Process, and released it as a now-scarce home video. It’s good fun.

A collection of live clips linked by skits, this vid’s amateurish 8mm vibe recalls Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth about De-Evolution. Musicians and other non-actors ad lib unsteadily through single takes filmed in conference rooms and parking lots.

Because it captured the specific emptiness of its time and place, I think of Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, a movie I last saw in 1997, as a cousin to L7: The Beauty Process. In one scene in the L7 movie, a guy from market research subjects the members of the group to the year’s hot new sounds. It’s a tour of everything awful: confessional singer-songwriters, third-wave ska, and “Nirvana-lite angst crybaby middle-class-white-boy grunge.” Then a record industry sleaze takes the band to lunch and offers them anything on the kids’ menu. Straightforward and entertaining enough, but the scene where the devil himself officiates a graduation ceremony for the four women of L7 is the one you take home. (They are graduating from having souls, I think?) And the live footage is, of course, a blast.

The bullshit copy on the sleeve is a good indication of the picture’s tone:

The Beauty Process is a bonafide Rock ‘n’ Roll film. The sensational rock group, L7, take us on a musical flight into the stratosphere only coming down to burrow deep into the sub terrain of music commerce. Bitter and irresponsible, it is a cautionary tale to those who aspire merging art with commerce. Ultimately, The Beauty Process is a moving inspiration demonstrating personal triumph and liberation in the face of adversity. Including the songs; Fast & Frightening, Drama, Shitlist, Andres & more!!!!

More after the jump…

 
Okay, so they’re probably not all the rage (I just said that as they’re currently making the rounds on the Internet). The “hairy leg leggings,” are sort of an inexplicable product to me. Why not just let the hair on your legs grow instead of buying a pair of these, is what I want to know? Seems like the most cost effective thing to do and you’ll still have money for pills. And if you don’t like it, just shave that shit off!

Anyway, the hairy leggings are available from custom UK clothing printer Contrado. If hairy leggings are not your thing (maybe they’re not?), you have other options to choose from.

There are no images of the crotch area for these leggings. I wonder if it’s smooth like a Ken doll? That’s the word on the street, at least.

 

 
via Geekologie

 
Robin Wills is the guitarist for the English band, the Barracudas, who scored a UK hit with their pogo-inducing 1980 single, “Summer Fun.” In 2006, during downtime from the Barracudas, he started the blog, PUREPOP. Over eight years ago, Wills uploaded two mysterious tracks he had acquired. He was able to identify one of the tunes as having been originally recorded by an obscure glam band, and had some other information, but no group name. Taken from a partially labeled acetate, both songs are snotty as fuck—positively glamtastic examples of proto-punk perfection.

Wills recognized one of the songs, “All Night Long,” as he knew the tune had been recorded by little-known L.A. glam act, Shady Lady. Their version was included on Raving Mad, a vinyl-only collection of Shady Lady’s unreleased studio sessions from the early ‘70s. Though it’s now out of print, it’s well worth looking for, especially if you’re one who likes to search out forgotten glam bands drenched in ahead-of-their-time punk attitude. I see there are a few copies of Raving Mad currently available on Discogs.
 

 
Wills knew that in 1973, Shady Lady guitarist John Christian went to London, taking “All Night Long” with him for his next project, which would feature model/actress Valerie Hunter on lead vocals. In his original 2008 post, Wills asked if anyone knew the name of the Christian/Hunter group. It took nearly nine years, but we finally have an answer.
 

 
Turns out, Hot Rocks is the name of the Christian/Hunter band (not to be confused with this Hot Rocks). By providing scans of some Hot Rocks promotional materials to Wills, it appears a PUREPOP reader by the name of Bob Stannard has solved the mystery (I’m pretty sure this is him). From their bio, we learn Hot Rocks was spearheaded by Hunter, who co-wrote their tunes with Christian, so it’s safe to assume they wrote the other song on the acetate, “Down on 42nd St.” The unit was rounded out by two session musicians, John “Insect” Weir on bass, and Graham “The Kid” Waxman on drums. On both cuts, the group nails the New York Dolls’ swagger, and Hunter’s vocals resemble Suzi Quatro—if she was from Manhattan, instead of Detroit. At the end of their bio, we get a window into what this presumably short-lived band was like as a live act (with a dose of press kit hyperbole, perhaps):

Hot Rocks has now played numerous gigs in London clubs and their visual attractiveness and driving music have provoked screaming encores. It is impossible to sit back and relax at a Hot Rocks gig. Their goal is to move an audience, make them come alive, participate. And they do.

Continues after the jump…

 
Jiří Růžek is one of the word’s best glamor and erotic photographers. He is described by critics and fans alike as an artist who has redefined the genre by producing fine art out of glamor photography.

Růžek considers himself just a photographer who takes nude portraits. He describes his work as Uglamour—a term he made up from the words “Ugly” and “Glamour.” He says his intention is to create “natural and straightforward photographs showing true and believable emotions.” This is what makes his photographs stand out and why many describe his work as fine art.

Born fifty years ago in Litoměřice, Czech Republic, Růžek is now based in Prague where he runs a studio, a workshop, and an exhibition space. His work has been exhibited across the globe and published in magazines and books by the likes of Taschen, Random House, Gmbh, and Constable & Robinson. Even with all this success, Růžek still finds time to run group and one-to-one photographic courses and private shoots.

But you really don’t need to know all this unless, of course, you wanna sign-up for a workshop or maybe be one of his photographic models. What I really want to share is Růžek’s gorgeous erotic 3-D Anaglyphs. These photos are stereoscopic pictures made from two red and cyan filtered colored images. Růžek’s 3-D photos have a sensuous beauty that recalls Edward Weston‘s nudes or Helmut Newton‘s provocative erotica but all are captured with Růžek’s own style. You’ll need your 3-D glasses to get the full effect.

See more of Jiří Růžek’s work here.
 

 

 

 
See more eye-catching 3-D beauty, after the jump…

 
Matthew Chasney has been a known commodity in the Cleveland music scene for years, having manned the drums for such well-known local outfits as Six Parts Seven and Afternoon Naps. Matt is currently pursuing a degree at Case Western Reserve University but took advantage of the slack summer schedule to journey down to Kentucky to report on a budding phenomenon in the wrestling world. He has a forthcoming book of photography called Silos. You can see more of his photography on his Instagram page.

Take it away, Matt:

“Does your husband know you’re here?” snarled a boy of perhaps ten years of age at a wrestling event in Martin, Kentucky, just a couple of days ago on the most patriotic day of the year, the Fourth of July. This provocative query was followed by a chorus of enraged Kentuckians chanting “Snowflake!” and (yes, really) “Lock him up!!”

The object of their anger was Dan Richards, known on the Appalachian Mountain Wrestling circuit as the “Progressive Liberal.” Richards—an actual liberal in real life—plays the role of a classic heel by antagonizing the paying customers in attendance. He struts and chides audiences while clad in a Hillary Clinton T-shirt, personally insulting them as simple-minded peasants while self-consciously embracing effete liberal mannerisms and whining about the unholy injustice of every call the ref makes against him. In turn, audiences ratchet up the vitriol ever further.

It should be noted that at this moment in the American political firmament, this Independence Day wrestling event in Martin could be mistaken for the valid political discourse occurring in the Beltway itself. After all, just two days earlier, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, reminded everybody about his own wrestling bona fides by re-tweeting an obnoxious clip of himself body-slamming an effigy of “fake news” CNN to the ground during a World Wrestling Federation event. You don’t have to be Vince McMahon to realize that Trump is setting up the 24-hour news network to be the despised heel to his own, ever-outrageous face.

Richards has gone viral thanks to national pieces appearing in Salon, the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, and NPR, but he has not been extensively photographed—until now.

Richards faced his brawny, conservative, Fox News-loving nemesis Kyle Maggard in a ring that was set up next to the Post Office in Martin. The bout featured lots of jumping and kicking and miscellaneous wrestling moves until it eventually devolved into a tag team melee. In the end Richards was defeated, but unlike his political counterpart his demise came at the hands of a piledriver, not the goddamned electoral college.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

An illustration of Richard Ramirez aka “The Night Stalker” on the cover of issue #25 of Serial Killer Magazine.
 
Serial Killer Magazine got its start in 2014 and to date has put out 25 issues dedicated to the dark world of serial killers. The page-turner is the holy grail for anyone into “murderabilia,” and the mag takes the business of providing in-depth information about serial murderers very seriously, often utilizing real experts in the field and in some cases, the killers themselves. As someone who has a macabre interest in these kinds of things, I’m embarrassed to admit that I had no knowledge of Serial Killer Magazine until today and was instantly captivated by its grim, illustrated covers.

As I’m sure you are aware, there is a pretty robust market for ephemera associated with serial killers. Paintings and illustrations done by one of the most well-known serial killers, John Wayne Gacy (you know, this guy) have sold for several thousands of dollars. However, it should be noted that some of Gacy’s “collectors” purchased his art to destroy it including the families of Gacy’s 33 victims. Another important point to make here is that the magazine wants to be clear that their product isn’t a means of glorifying the notorious crimes it details within its pages, but is intended to be a resource for anyone that has an interest in real crime. That said, the magazine sells for $15 an issue which you can get here. I’ve posted a few of my favorite covers from Serial Killer Magazine below that I am sure many of our more dangerously-minded readers will enjoy checking out.
 

Issue #11 featuring a portrait of Carl Panzram by the great Joe Coleman. Panzram was a prolific criminal who in addition to being a serial killer was also an arsonist, rapist, and burglar. 
 

Issue #23 featuring a super creepy illustration by Rowan Andrews of John Wayne Gacy.
 
More after the jump…

 
Between appearing in La Dolce Vita and cutting a single with Jimmy Page and Andrew Loog Oldham, Nico beat out Ursula Andress for the lead role in a feature film: Jacques Poitrenaud’s 1963 Strip-Tease (a/k/a Sweet Skin and Lady Strip Tease). Billed as “Krista Nico,” she stars as German dancer Ariane, a character described by Poitrenaud as “a stripper lost in the nocturnal world.”

In White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-by-Day, VU biographer Richie Unterberger quotes from an interview with Ciné Monde in which Nico discusses filming her nude scene:

They did it as I preferred. They cleared the set. I then drank several glasses of port. And they played a haunting tune to carry me through the ordeal. As for the rest, a woman always finds out how to keep on top of the situation.

 

 
Serge Gainsbourg, who scored Strip-Tease (and makes an uncredited appearance sharing a piano with Big Joe Turner), recorded a demo of the title song with Nico in ‘62.

Continues after the jump…

The cover for the VHS of ‘Let My Puppets Come’ a puppet porn film from 1976.
 
Gerard Damiano directed the legendary 1972 porn film Deep Throat but he also played a part in the skin flick under the goofy name “Al Gork” who was credited as the “Last Man” in the film. Four years after that accomplishment Damiano would write and direct a porn film called Let My Puppets Come. The bizarre movie utilized marionettes that looked much like the beloved cast of The Muppet Show. But instead of musical numbers and comedy sketches, Damiano’s degenerate puppets spent their time on screen engaging in all kinds of hardcore sex acts with other puppets and the occasional human.

The 45-minute raunch-fest coincidentally made its debut the very same year The Muppet Show first aired on television. Most people who have witnessed the car-crashy horror that is Let My Puppets Come call the film everything from “charming” (huh?) to a downright “disasterpiece” both of which sound like pretty fair assessments to me even though I’ve never actually seen the flick in its entirety. Damiano enlisted the voice skills of sleaze king Al Goldstein, the co-founder of SCREW. Goldstein was also joined by actor Louie De Jesus (the twisted dwarf from the 1976 film Bloodsucking Freaks) and Viju Krim (who played the ballerina in Bloodsucking Freaks).

Apparently, it was Damiano’s intention to make a “sexy” puppet film, but somehow he ended up making a movie about puppets having orgies and engaging in sex acts with a puppet dog. Even good old Al Goldstein gets a blowjob from one of Damiano’s puppets which only ups the bizarro factor of the long out of print film. Occasionally VHS or DVD rips of Let My Puppets Come pop up on auction sites like eBay or on Amazon but they aren’t cheap like the horny stars of the film, and even a copy of the VHS can run you $80. I’ve posted a few images from the movie along with a trailer of sorts that features an unreleased theme song for the film “Take Your Baby to the Movies.” Everything that follows is NSFW and also confusing as fuck. Enjoy!
 

 

I’m not sure what is going on in this still. At all. And that’s probably okay.
 
More tawdry puppet activity after the jump…

 
Any discussion about the presidency in 2017 has to start with the notion that about 90% of Americans living or dead would be an improvement over the current occupant of the Oval Office. Having said that, it’s much more fun to contemplate an actual presidential hopeful of several decades ago that really might have been waaaaaaay better in many respects than ANY of the 45 men we’ve had as president so far (okay, actually 44).

I refer to Mary Hartman, the doubly eponymous main character from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Norman Lear’s groundbreaking and addictive soap parody from the mid-1970s that starred Louise Lasser and also did so much to introduce the country to the prodigious talents of Mary Kay Place, Martin Mull, Dabney Coleman, and Doris Roberts. (One of the most astonishing aspects of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was that it was produced five days a week for more than a year, meaning that it left behind a remarkable 325 episodes in its 2 seasons. Today you can buy the entire series on DVD of course.)

You probably didn’t know that Mary Hartman was a presidential candidate in 1976, the year that Democrat Jimmy Carter narrowly bested the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford. And if you didn’t know that, then it’s extremely unlikely you knew that Patti Smith was her running mate. I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I will assert with a high degree of confidence that the Constitution does not bar fictional characters from the presidency. As for Patti Smith, who is definitely not fictional, she became the ticket’s VP pick without any consent or even knowledge that it was happening, but she graciously accepted the bid after the fact.

The whole thing was a kind of prank or stunt by the Fluxus practitioner and “mail art” pioneer Jerry Dreva, a native of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the early 1970s, Dreva and some of his fellow Wisconsinites, finding themselves in Southern California, founded a collective known as Les Petites Bonbons that specialized in mail art pranks.
 

 
One thing about mail art is that it tends to announce the location of its projects. The Hartman/Smith ticket mailing, which appears to have numbered about 1,500, actually has a return address on it, 629 Madison Ave., in South Milwaukee, so it might be the case that Dreva had returned to his home state by that time. It’s not clear. Dreva passed away in 1997.

There is incredibly little information about the Hartman/Smith project. In a 1984 issue of High Performance, Suzan Carson wrote that “Dreva livens up the most boring presidential election in memory with two flyers promoting the candidacy of Mary Hartman for president and Patti Smith for vice-president of the United States.” She also added that Smith accepted the nomination as “president of vice” (har har) at a Milwaukee concert. That concert was probably held at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theatre in March 1976—anybody reading this remember that show?

Earlier this year, there was an auction on Canadian eBay for a “small collection of late-1970s works by mail-art pioneer Jerry Dreva, including glossy prints for the Mary Hartman / Patti Smith campaign in 1976,” which also included several other amusing mailings by Dreva from 1976 and a little bit later, and I’ve reproduced some of those here for the fun of it.

It’s a shame Mary Hartman didn’t get elected president—it would have been fun to watch the Supreme Court tussle with that legal conundrum. Of course I suppose it’s likely that Smith would have become president instead. Or maybe Hartman would have stayed president—and done more good for the country than Donald Trump will ever do.
 

 

 
More of Jerry Dreva’s postal tomfoolery after the jump…..

‘The Fates.’
 
When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, the Pope knew the Catholic Church was in big trouble. Il Papa knew the Catholic Church was going to lose business and business was money.

Business was one of the many things Luther complained about in his Theses. Mainly the notion of indulgences or paying off the Church to wipe clean any sins that meant damnation or purgatory in the hereafter.

Now, all this hoo-hah led to three different Popes (including naughty Pope Julius III) presiding over the Council of Trent—which is only important to our little story because among many other things it got the Pope hip to the idea of spreading Catholicism through art.

This wasn’t a new idea by any stretch but it was something the Church really finessed after Luther and used to its full extent to enforce its will. The Church signed-up all the best artists to create large, powerful, iconic paintings to spread the faith to the illiterate mass market. These paintings were displayed in churches. They told the story of Jesus Christ blah-blah-blah and made pretty damn clear to everyone watching that hellfire, damnation, and sin were very, very real things and only the good old Catholic Church could save you from them.

So, in a way, Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses inadvertently led to the first major global advertising campaign. Yeah, yeah, there’d been plenty of paintings and iconography and invading armies with their very own trademarks before, but nothing quite as organized or as universal as the Church. It wasn’t all bad. This eventually led to artists questioning their subject matter and a progression towards more humanist symbolism in painting and an age of Enlightenment.

What the Church encouraged on the grand scale is what we all do today with memes—embed narrative into imagery. Why is this important? Well, it’s a bit of a back story to the baroque world of painting which has in may ways been brought bang up-to-date in the work of an exceptionally talented Argentinian artist and sculptor named Gabriel Grun.

Grun paints bold, classical, figurative canvases that relate to earlier times. He is not copying the past and he is certainly not selling us religion but rather using myth, legend, and iconography to examine this world. The obvious ones are paintings like the The Three Fates where our life is spun, measured, and then cut. Or the body of the invasive many-eyed Argus who reflects our world of constant supervision. Or Leda seduced by Zeus disguised as a swan which has its parallel today in nature altered by science from test tube babies to sperm donation. Or the archer who will shoot down the gods to commit suicide.

His paintings are sometimes humorous but most times heavily charged with sex and sexuality—humanity under the thrall of its shared sexual impulse.

Grun is magpie-like in his use of ideas. The painting “Nari Asva” was inspired by an old Hindu legend of shepherdesses devoted to Krishna who take the form of a horse upon which Krishna rode. In Grun’s painting, the form of the horse is Archimboldoesque and surreal. Other obvious influences include the Tarot Arcana, Albrecht Dürer, and Flemish portraiture.

If, like me, you find Grun’s paintings beautiful and utterly engaging, then you may be interested to know they are for sale and he has a blog where you can find more of his work.
 

‘Sun and Moon.’
 

‘Nari Asva.’
 

‘Hermaphrodite.’
 
See more of Gabriel Grun’s work, after the jump…