“Policewoman - Gay City” an adult themed comic from Italy, 1970s/1980s

I love to blog about topics that are popular with the crowd on the wrong side of the tracks, and the unsettling, strange and straight up bizarre covers of the following vintage Italian comics that you are about to see, fall into that very category.
 

“Vital Energy” the cover of an adult Italian comic from the 1970s/1980s
 
According to the book, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s, adult-themed Italian comics comics began to find their way to France, where they were translated and published starting in the very early 70s, which, before I’m schooled by our astute readers that some of the covers pictured here are not written in Italian, explains why some of the magazines in this post are in French.

Known in Italy as “fumetto” or its plural “fumetti,” the grown-up comics generally featured scantily-clad women being subjected to all kinds of manhandling and mayhem. Such as sexual assaults by super-buff men with monkey heads (and other horny man/animal hybrids), bad guys with bestiality issues, as well as a little good-old-fashioned BDSM. In other words, anything goes as long as it involves a hot chick with large breasts, in some sort of sexy peril. That said, please assume that all of what follows is strictly NSFW.
 

“The Razor’s Edge”
 

“Musketeer” (printed in Italian)
 

 
Here’s a wonderful blast of 1960s NYC cool, in the form of a 1986 episode of The South Bank Show dedicated to the Velvet Underground. It’s slightly jarring to hear host Melvyn Bragg in the opening credit VU as being a precursor to punk rock and a major influence on artists “as diverse as David Bowie, Talking Heads, and the young Jesus and Mary Chain.” (It’s difficult to imagine Bragg putting on Psychocandy as he reads the morning paper, isn’t it?)

The show features ample interviews with all of the members of the band, including Nico, as well as personages like Gerard Malanga, Victor Bockris, Henry Geldzahler, and Robert Christgau. Naturally Warhol pops up in the archive footage. There’s a bunch of so-called “underground” footage, including some clips filmed by Jonas Mekas of the band’s “first appearance” (according to a helpful title card) at the Delmonico Hotel in New York City on January 14, 1966.

There’s nothing truly earth-shaking here, but it’s still quite interesting to see the whole band willing to be interviewed, and at a moment when their reputation was not quite as towering as it has since become. (Today, the premise that they were one of the very most influential bands of the 1960s is a no-brainer. In 1986 they were still seen more as the forefathers of punk, with their back catalog only coming fully back into print in the US around that time.)
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Moe Gets Tied Up,’ Andy Warhol’s ultra-rare 1966 movie starring the Velvet Underground
Amazing ‘Mod Wedding’ with Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground & Nico, 1966

 
The good people at Welcome To Twin Peaks have shared a wonderful web widget with which you can kill some quality time today—”David Lynch Doodle.” It’s a caricature of Lynch (who turns 70 today) with his epic haircut lopped off, and you get to draw it in, with eleven simulated brushes to choose from. (While you justly make fun of my shitty efforts, bear in mind that I went to art school. And graduated. In lots of debt.)
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
David Bowie found that being a superstar in the 1980s was “not terribly fulfilling.” He started the decade with a massively successful album Let’s Dance and world tour. It made him very rich. It also brought commercial expectations to write another album of pop hits to make him and his record company even more money. But hard commerce and creativity rarely endure.  Bowie soon discovered that he had less creative independence to make the music he wanted. After the negative reception to his follow-up albums 1984’s Tonight and Never Let Me Down in 1987, he launched his massive Glass Spider tour. It made plenty of money, too, but with a set-list of greatest hits the tour looked like the Thin White Duke was rehearsing for a residency in Las Vegas.

In 1989, Bowie formed Tin Machine with guitarist Reeves Gabrels and the Sales brothers—drummer Hunt and bassist Tony. The band had grown out of jam sessions. The Sales had played with Bowie when they had backed Iggy Pop together in the 70s. Gabrels met Bowie during his Glass Spider tour and collaborated together on a reworking of the Lodger song “Look Back in Anger.” Tin Machine was structured as a “democratic unit.” Each member had an equal say. Bowie described himself as just the singer. Their intention as a band was to play “back to basics” music—hard rock, low production, no over-dubs.

They recorded over 30 songs in six weeks. Bowie enthused in interviews how liberating it was to write songs in collaboration with his bandmates. Of being able to share an idea and have it taken in an utterly different direction. Their 1989 debut album, the eponymously titled Tin Machine sold well enough but was savaged by the critics. The sales were in large part down to Bowie’s loyal fanbase and the band had a successful world tour. Then Bowie took a year off to do his solo Sound + Vision outing. In 1991, Tin Machine regrouped and released Tin Machine II—which received even worse reviews than their first record and led one music magazine (Q) to ask the question: Are Tin Machine crap?

Though both albums have noteworthy tracks, the main problem with Tin Machine is its being a “band” and not a David Bowie solo project. Having four equal partners in a group works best when there are four members of equal ability. Bowie was too talented, too clever and too damned good to share equal billing with three musicians for hire.

The critics may have been overly harsh in their judgment of the band—some even dared to suggest Bowie’s career was finished. But in truth, Bowie needed Tin Machine to purge what had been—what had gone wrong—so he could start again evolving again as an artist. This led to a return to form with his first solo album of the 1990s—Black Tie, White Noise.

More Tin Machine after the jump….

 
That the music underground is so engaged with Bernie Sanders’ worker-friendly, anti-1% presidential campaign comes as no surprise—punk and left politics have always been extremely comfortable bedfellows (sorry not sorry Michale Graves), and it’s a big plus that Sanders’ oppositional candidacy is being run within one of the mainstream parties, and thus won’t serve as a potential election spoiler like the Nader insurgency that ultimately spelled disaster for both the Green Party and the USA. Last autumn, we at Dangerous Minds told you about Berned in DC, a Facebook group producing image macros of the candidate paired with invented quotations that mirrored hardcore scene purism, to utterly hilarious effect. Today, our task is to show you the work of L.A. artist Mark Mendez and Portland printer Rob Campbell, who’ve created a wonderful series of Sanders shirts based on well-known punk band logos. In an interview with Visual News, the pair offered:

It’s hard to think of Bernie as “punk rock” by his appearance alone. He’s a 74-year-old, white, veteran politician from Vermont. But his ideals are what make him the most punk rock candidate who ever ran for office. He’s been speaking about economic inequality, civil rights, and antiestablishment politics for over four decades. It is people like us who do what we can to support his campaign and raise awareness about who he is, what he stands for, and how we the people can make a difference.

They’ve named the t-shirt line “Bern the White House” (simply brilliant—how has nobody used that before now?), and the shirts can be bought from the pair’s Etsy shop or from bernthewhitehouse.com. The profits from the sales will of course benefit the Sanders campaign up to the amount legally permitted for individual contributions, after which proceeds will go to “Bernie-friendly charities and grassroots organizations.”
 

Misfits
 

The Adicts
 

Ramones
 
More after the jump…

 
Here’s a short video of a chef getting caught cutting a line of coke on a daytime Slovakian TV show. I’m betting the camera guy had a lot of answering to do after that shot. Not the chef. He looks like someone you wouldn’t want to mess with.

 
via The Kraftfuttermischwerk

 
A devotion to politics as theatrical spectacle and vice versa made Jerry Rubin, along with Abbie Hoffman, one of the most visible and notorious activists in the counterculture of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. A founder, again along with Hoffman and others, of the Youth International Party (a/k/a the Yippies), Rubin was known for media-engaging stunts like showing up for his HUAC testimony variously dressed as a Viet Cong guerrilla and as Santa Claus. His utterly gonzo approach to politics flipped in the mid ‘70s, when in a surprising ideological reversal, he became a capitalist businessman who ended the decade (and entered the Reagan years) as a yuppie millionaire, advocating for EST, “networking parties,” and diet fads instead of revolution. Credit where it’s due, though—among his capital ventures was an effort to marshall investment in solar panels.

Hindsight of that transformation/sellout might be a part of what makes the clip below feel kinda righteous. Though the Chicago Seven trial made Rubin a well-known public face of The Revolution™, there were times when he wasn’t one of its most articulate advocates. He appeared on Cleveland, OH television in 1970 (Rubin was Cincinnati born and raised, himself) to flog his screed DO IT! Scenarios of the Revolution, but he just came off like an inchoate stoner jackass. He had science on his side in his assertion that weed is less destructive than booze, but he was such a dumb dick about it, prolonging an unproductive back-and-forth on the matter, sounding more like a tedious sophomore ruining Thanksgiving than a nationally-known activist engaging with the public to bring awareness to his manifesto. He piled on tiresome levels of I’m-so-cool smarm to cover the deficiencies in his talking points until the fed-up interviewer—an improbably flame-haired 76-year-old lady named Dorothy—got sick of his bullshit and shut the interview down.
 

 
About that Dorothy: she wasn’t just any little old lady—she was a career ass-kicker. Dorothy Fuldheim was and remains a widely admired Cleveland legend, a broadcasting lifer and pioneer for women in newsrooms who’s acknowledged as the first female TV news anchor. Her utterly unbelievable highlight reel included one-on-one interviews with Adolf Hitler (Fuldheim was Jewish), Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, and Jimmy Hoffa, and she didn’t retire until age 91, when a stroke she suffered shortly after interviewing Ronald Reagan (make of that what you will) made it impossible for her to continue working. She died in 1989, and was recently the subject of a Drunk History segment that you should probably just go ahead and watch right now.

Fuldheim was unapologetically opinionated; she shut down her Rubin interview when his declaration of solidarity with the Black Panthers proved to be her last straw. But though she was very much an establishment figure, bristling at Rubin’s characterization of police as “pigs,” she was no conservative, and it’s tempting to wonder how her feelings about Cleveland’s finest may have changed had something like the Tamir Rice murder and the outcry in its aftermath happened in her lifetime. We actually don’t even have to wonder all that hard; within a month of the Rubin interview, she put her career at risk to TORPEDO then-Governor James Rhodes and the Ohio National Guard on the air in the wake of the Kent State shootings, forcefully decrying a system that killed its own children.

Continues after the jump…

Germany
 
You might not know it, but we’re in the middle of pagan ritual season! Every year from December until Easter, people from every country in Europe partake in pagan rituals in order to honor the planet’s annual cycle of death and rebirth.

Several years ago Charles Fréger set out to document the many costumes used all over Europe for pagan rituals, visiting 18 countries on his journey to pin down the archetype of the “Wild Man” that transcends any one culture. The pictures were then collected in a marvelous book called Wilder Mann. The costumes he found resemble something out of commedia dell’arte or Día de los Muertos, only far deeper and far stranger. They clearly represent the devil, billy goats, wild boars, and bizarre conflagrations thereof, using all manner of masks, straw, horns, pine twigs, antlers, bells, fur, and bones.

As it happens, I’ve attended pagan rituals myself, in rural Austria, and I’ve met men who work on their intricate, large, wooden Krampus masks all year long in preparation for the fantastical Krampus “performance” in early December. I mention this as a prelude to explaining that (in my opinion) telling the difference between some authentic pagan belief and just people partaking in a fun pastime isn’t a straightforward proposition. It isn’t that such people are necessarily undertaking such rituals in order appease the earth goddess Erda and improve next year’s crop yield or anything like that, but at the same time I think that participants and spectators alike would agree that everyone is getting something necessary out of it, something communal, something emotional.

Of the project, Fréger says, “‘It is not about been possessed by a spirit but it is about jumping voluntarily in the skin of an animal. You decide to become something else. You chose to become an animal, which is more exciting than being possessed by a demon.”

Enjoy these remarkable pictures.
 

Finland
 

Basque Country
 

Portugal
 

Macedonia
 
More pagan ritual garb after the jump…

 
In 1987, the B-52s produced an incredible public service announcement for AMFAR (The Foundation For AIDS Research) with the late NYC-based video artist Tom Rubnitz (best known for the “Strawberry Shortcut” and “Pickle Surprise” videos) and several of their closest famous friends. The colorful tableau vivant recreated the Beatles’ iconic Sgt. Pepper’s album cover with the flowers spelling out “Be Alive”

Along with the B-52s, you’ll see Korean video artist Nam Jun Paik, Allen Ginsberg, Dancenoise, “voguing” pioneer Willi Ninja, Nile Rodgers, Joey Arias, Tseng Kwong Chi, Mink Stole, ABC’s David Yarritu, “Frieda the Disco Doll,” John Kelly as the Mona Lisa, Lady Bunny, performance artist Mike Smith, Kenny Scharf, David Byrne and then-wife Adelle Lutz, model Beverly Johnson, NYC “It Girl” Dianne Brill and Quentin Crisp among many others.

If this isn’t eighties enough for you already, note the presence of “Randee of the Redwoods” (comedian Jim Turner) the acid-fried MTV “presidential candidate.”
 

 
Even in these so-called enlightened times it’s not so unthinkable that some slobbering buffoon could be elected the leader of a great country to the detriment of its people, and indeed the entire world. In politics the unthinkable is always possible—and unfortunately such dangerous men often stand for election. You can recognize them by their speeches that play on fears and grievances and creates division thru trumped up accusations against anyone who disagrees with them—I’m sure you know the Trump type.

Charlie Chaplin was all too aware of the dangers of some twit being elected on a racist, xenophobic and downright nasty manifesto when he poked fun at Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator. Though Chaplin was criticized by various countries (Germany, Britain) for being irresponsible while making his fascist satire, he was soon vindicated by the actions of Herr Hitler and the Second World War—though the great comedian and director later said he felt some regret about making the movie:

Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.

On its release in 1940 The Great Dictator was an enormous success in the Allied countries—though not at all in Nazi Germany… The film was a rallying point for those who wanted to defeat the evils of Nazism. It helped people to laugh at the Nazis while at same time being made aware of the insidious dangers of voting a madman into power—a point still highly relevant today.

In the film, a Jewish barber is mistaken for the dictator Adenoid Hynkel and by chance ends up taking his place. At the end of the film, the barber addresses Hynkel’s army of followers with a speech about hope and humanity:

I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an Emperor – that’s not my business – I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.

We all want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed….

You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let’s use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Now that’s the kind of manifesto I’d vote for.
 

 

 

 

 
More photos of Chaplin as ‘The Great Dictator’ plus color footage, after the jump…