As if any further proof were needed that the World Wide Web has a home for every obsession, I offer you Letterheady, an online compendium of celebrity stationery. It’s a project of Shaun Usher, a curator of “online homages to offline correspondence” who is also the collector behind the web sites and books Lists of Note and Letters of Note both of which are exactly as described on the box.

I am utterly enrapt by this collection. (And for space reasons, I kind of wish I’d hit upon this idea before I became a record collector.) Even the very plain examples—John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Rita Hayworth, Kate Bush—are compelling to me in their way, for reasons I am powerless to articulate, but some of the graphically designed pieces are just fantastic. (Also, I love that two of the most crucial graphic artists of the 20th Century had such sparse letterhead—I want to show those to every editor from my years as a magazine designer who ever handwaved my insistence that pages needed white space.) It was difficult to narrow them down to what I could show you here, so I have to recommend that you consider spending some time at the site itself.
 

Adam Ant
 

Martin and Lewis
 

Terry Gilliam
 

Anais Nin
 
More letterhead of the famous after the jump…

 
In 2004 Scott Stuckey, of the Stuckey restaurant family, started a cable access show in the Washington, DC, area to answer the question, “What would Sesame Street look like if most of the guests were indie rockers?” The show is called Pancake Mountain. This year the Sesame Street connection became stronger when it was announced that PBS would start licensing new episodes of the show.

In this clip, Shirley Manson of 1990s Wisconsin rock heroes Garbage appears in a segment called “Around the World with Shirley Manson” in which she explains the German music scene to an obstreperous canine puppet. Wearing a rather fetching flight attendant-style getup, Manson does a more than creditable job of presenting the breadth of German music, from the masterpieces of Beethoven and Bach to Volkslieder (which means folk songs; here it’s yodeling) to the groundbreaking 20th-century music of Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, and well, Scorpions.
 

 
This was evidently supposed to be a series—Manson filmed five of the segments—but Stuckey and producer J.J. Abrams canceled the show in 2011 before they could be aired. However, as already mentioned, PBS has agreed to license some new episodes. The Germany segment is the only one of Manson’s “Around the World” series to trickle out to the public as yet. You can get Pancake Mountain DVDs on Amazon; on Disc 1 you can see bands like Thievery Corporation, Steel Pulse, Vic Chesnutt, and The Evens. Disc 2 seems decidedly more promising, featuring Arcade Fire, Henry Rollins, The Fiery Furnaces, George Clinton, and the Scissor Sisters. A few months ago my estimable colleague Ron Kretsch posted some marvelous footage of David Yow of the Jesus Lizard on Pancake Mountain discoursing on the culinary arts.
 
The video of the skit is “autostart” which means we can’t embed it here, but you can see it on this page. Here’s an associated clip in which Manson sings an original song in a kind of groovy go-go style that covers much of the same material as the skit with the puppet.
 

 
I have to tell you, I adore pinball, and I’m very excited to make a trip to my local bowling palace sometime in the next year or so to try out the soon-to-be-released Big Lebowski pinball machine, duly licensed by Universal Studios and manufactured by Dutch Pinball. The machine retails for $8,500 (which can be broken up into four payments), excluding taxes and fees; if you would like to pre-order one, you can do it here. They aren’t kidding about the “Dutch” in “Dutch Pinball.” Ahem: “Residents of the European Union are subject to Dutch BTW (VAT). ... Customers living outside of the European Union are not required to pay Dutch VAT; however, you may be subject to an import tariff.”

The game has three levels, including a stunning re-creation of a bowling alley (“Licensed Brunswick Lane Design”) underneath the main level. The game will play songs from the movie, including Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me,” Kenny Rogers’ “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In,” and Santana’s “Oye Como Va.”

Details on gameplay are not the easiest to come by, but the game features three “Character Modes,” two “Car Modes,” a “Mark It Zero” bonus, and three “Rug Modes” (you read that right). Marvelously, the game features a life-sized, actual goddamn White Russian that juts out of the playing field on the right-hand side and occasionally lights up.

When you speak of this—and you know you will—please resist the temptation to make a “rug ties it all together” joke, everyone’s already done that one.
 

 

 

 

 

 
“Attract mode lighting”:

 
Three more videos detailing the luscious Lebowski pinball machine, after the jump….

uterus
 
Guatemalan-born artist Camila Carlow manages to depict organs in a floral, feminine light with “pretty” accurate depictions rendered in plant life. Her “Eye Heart Spleen” series (billed as “a tribute to nature’s invisible work”) is created entirely from materials she foraged. It’s quite a lovely tribute to our hardworking, rarely appreciated innards!

From her website:

The most fascinating and intricate of biological structures, yet we rarely pay heed to the organs inside our body. Regardless of whether we fill ourselves with toxins or nourishing food, whether we exercise or not - our organs sustain us, working away effortlessly and unnoticed.

In a similar way, plants flourishing in the urban environment are a testament to nature’s indifference to our goings on. They grow out of the sides of buildings, in brick walls and between the cracks in concrete, despite of the traffic and pollution.

You can buy Carlow’s prints on Etsy—maybe the perfect gift for that girly gastroenterologist you’re looking to woo? 
 

testicles
 

spleen
 

breast, note the inclusion of lymph nodes
 

pancreas
 

lungs
 

kidneys
 

heart
 

gut
 

The Cramps, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy
 
I’ve been an admirer of Atlanta-based pop artist Zteven for a while now and own many pieces from his pop culture-inspired soup can series (Lemmy Kilmister-flavored Bouillabaisse anyone?). In an interview earlier this year, Zteven cited the very moment his artistic inspiration was born after he saw Andy Warhol’s appearance on The Love Boat (which incidentally aired on October 12th of 1985 during season nine/episode three). The young Zteven was instantly mesmerized by Warhol’s “awkward coolness.” He developed an insatiable appetite for comic books, music and TV magazine, as well as the occasional tabloid while accompanying his grandmother to the beauty parlor.

Zteven is an 80’s kid to the core, and his artwork celebrates the many highlights of this glorious decade that often gets a worse rap than it deserves. Sail on over to Zteven’s Popmania! Etsy shop to see more.
 

Devo
 

Marc Bolan
 

‘Strangers with Candy’
 

Divine and Edith Massey
 

‘Pink Flamingos’ triptych
 

Tura Satana
 

Little Edie and Big Edie from ‘Grey Gardens’
 

David Bowie

 
Twelve years ago, when I was working in a video store that was selling off its VHS inventory, a coworker put a used copy of this terrible movie in my hands. It’s hard to convey how seedy the tape looked and felt—unevenly shrinkwrapped with the aid of a hair dryer, blazoned with a yellow paper sticker advertising a sale price of $3.99. Of course, I loved punk and metal ephemera, the more degraded and disgusting the better; but something about this particular tape just seemed gross. However, I reasoned that it couldn’t be all bad, since they’d stolen The Screamers’ logo for the box. Boy, was I wrong.

Five years before duBEAT-e-o, there was a movie in the works called We’re All Crazy Now that was to have starred The Runaways. Although the Runaways broke up in the spring of 1979, filming went ahead that summer with Joan Jett and three actresses playing the band. In September, Billboard reported:

Set Runaways Film

LOS ANGELES—Production has started on the feature motion picture “We’re All Crazy Now,” loosely based on the career of the all-girl rock act the Runaways. The Zane-Helpern independent production stars Arte Johnson, Runaways’ member Joan Jett and former Herman’s Hermits leader Peter Noone. Cheryl Smith, Karen and Kathy Fallentine round out the cast as the remainder of the original Runaways.

(Yes, that is Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith of Caged Heat fame. And who could forget those great “original Runaways,” Karen and Kathy Fallentine?)

The production fell apart and the movie was abandoned. Somehow, by 1984, the footage wound up in the hands of producer Alan Sacks, the creative genius behind Welcome Back, Kotter, Chico and the Man, and, more recently, Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience. Sacks cast Ray Sharkey as an editor who—get this—is assigned to make a movie out of some old footage of Joan Jett! (I think this is what the credits are referring to when they say the movie is “Based on an idea by Alan Sacks.” Wherever does he get his ideas?) Rounding out the cast this time were El Duce of The Mentors, Derf Scratch of FEAR, and performance artist Johanna Went.

I would recommend heroin addiction before I would recommend watching the whole movie, but I would also guess that Mentors fans (people of discriminating taste) are slightly less likely to hate it than Joan Jett fans. Aside from the We’re All Crazy Now footage and a handful of original scenes, the movie is a desultory montage of Ed Colver punk photos, smut Polaroids, religious kitsch, comic book covers and stills of El Duce cavorting with unlucky women. While these images roll by, members of the cast and crew gab in voiceover, sounding wasted and bored. Sure, it sounds like fun now, but give it three minutes.

The most enthusiastic review of duBEAT-e-o came from The Psychotronic Video Guide:

“This thing is nuts! It played in theaters!”

Three minutes of duBEAT-e-o:

 
77-year-old grandmother and infamous Bosnian eyeball licker Hava Cebic claims she can cure people’s eye problems by the soft caress of her tongue on their eyeballs. Apparently she can cure anything from eye splinters, ocular hypertension to conjunctivitis crusts (ew).

Cebic resides in the small village of Crnjevo in northern Bosnia and has been licking eyeballs since she was child.

How does someone get into the business of licking eyeballs, you ask? Well, what started out as joke as a child when she licked her brother’s eyeball and then OMG he could see better after that… a “Golden Tongue” was born and a boomin’ eyeball licking business was created.

“At first my husband was very confused and didn’t want me to do it,” she says. “But one day he got a piece of wood in his eye and after I licked it out he agreed that I had a gift, and I should help others. Now, whenever anyone has something stuck in their eye or whatever, they come to me.”

According to reports online, “villagers from nearby towns and villages flock to have their eyeballs licked.” 

As a very important sidenote, Cebic calms the nerves of the squeamish by stating, “I always make sure I wash my tongue in alcohol before and after an eye licking.”

Well thank god for that!

Below, the dangers of eyeball licking:

 
via Metro UK, Croatian Times

 
Although it is usually referred to as an “Off-Broadway” production—when it is referred to at all—the 1974 musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road, in fact, ran for 66 performances at the Beacon Theatre, which as any Westsider can tell you, is smack-dab on Broadway itself, even if it’s a cab ride away from “the Great White Way” theater district.

Likewise, I suppose it’s a bit disingenuous to say that this show was “John Lennon’s flop,” but Lennon was involved and aside from co-writing the music (duh) he attended several rehearsals and performances and helped promote the play. Paul McCartney on the other hand, may have never even seen it.
 

 
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road was conceived by Tom O’Horgan, the “Busby Berkeley of the acid set” as the New York Times described him in his 2009 obituary. O’Horgan was a proponent of experimental “total theater” and had directed Jean Genet’s The Maids at La MaMa in the East Village before moving uptown to the Broadway successes of Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and Lenny.
 

 
From the surviving evidence of the show, it looked like it was totally insane. TIME magazine hated it, their review was titled “Contagious Vulgarity” and it went out of its way to excoriate O’Horgan’s style of musical theater. Other reviewers were much kinder and even enthusiastic, but the show which opened on November 17, 1974 was still closed by late January.

Ted Neeley, the actor long synonymous with the title role in Jesus Christ Superstar here played the Candide-like “Billy Shears.” The sexy siren “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was played by Alaina Reed (“Olivia” from Sesame Street), while the role of “Sgt. Pepper” went to David Patrick Kelly an actor best known for uttering the immortal line “Warriors…come out to play-ee-ay!!”
 

 
And then there were the dancers whose hair don’ts and dresses are a direct rip-off of Divine’s look in Female Trouble!

Apparently there’s very little documentation of the production. Opening night attendees included Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Lennon who went with May Pang, “Papa” John Phillips (whose own flop Broadway musical, Man on the Moon, produced by Andy Warhol would open two months later) and Yoko Ono who gamely supported her estranged husband.

While researching this post, I discovered that John Lennon at one point was offered the, er… Ted Neeley role in Jesus Christ Superstar but when he insisted that Yoko play Mary Magdalene, the offer was withdrawn. The jokes about her breaking up the twelve disciples would have written themselves…

One of the associate producers, Howard Dando, put together a slideshow plus some footage of opening night taken from John Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night” promo film. Although the producer was Bee Gees manager Robert Stigwood, who also produced the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band film, there was apparently not much of the O’Horgan’s musical play that made its way into the derided movie.
 

 
Thank you kindly Chris Campion of Palm Springs, CA! Mr. Campion is presently engaged writing the authorized biography of “Papa” John Phillips.

English caricaturist James Gillray‘s famous cartoon ‘Fashionable Contrasts’
 
If you’re not following John Overholt on Twitter, I suggest you get on it. As a Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts for Houghton Library at Harvard, he Tweets about some strange, beautiful and often hilarious texts. Take The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Revealed an 18th century sex manual written by a French doctor, then translated to (“done into”) English by “a gentleman” (is a gentleman supposed to call himself a gentleman? Sounds a little excessively boastful to me.) Though the language is prissy, and the “information” wildly inaccurate, it’s important to remember that England was in the midst of a sexual revolution at the time, and books like this one represented a major move in cultural liberalism (for the upper classes, at least).

Still, let’s laugh at some particularly absurd excerpts!

We call the principle part of the Man’s Privaties the Virile Member, which the Ancients ranked among the number of their Gods under the Name of Falscines, to teach us what Empire it has acquir’d in the World: For no Charms or Enlightenments can equal it. If perchance a Woman perceives it thro’ some slight unfolding of the Garments, her Heart is at the same Instant inflam’d with a Passion, that is with Difficulty assuaged.

I feel like you might be giving yourself a little too much credit here.

The Privy parts of a Woman, by some called Nature, because all Men owe their Origin to them, are the cause of most of our Sorrows, as well as our Pleasures; and I dare say, that all Disorders, that every happen’d in the World, or do happen in this our time, spring form the same source.

I feel like you might be giving us a little too much credit here.

There is a part above the [Nympha?], longer more or less than half a Finger, called by Anatomists Clitoris,which I may justly term the Fury and Rage of Love. There Nature has plac’d the fear of Pleasure and Lust, as it has, on the other hand, in the Glans of Man. There is has plac’d those excessive Ticklings, and there is Leachery and Lasciviousnes establish’d;

I stopped after “half a finger.”

But ‘tis certain that Women have Testicles, spermatick Vessels and Seed, because they sometimes pollute themselves; and their Testicles, which are hollow instead of being solid, as Men’s are, contain several small Cellules, wherein a Humor is kept, that spurts up in the Face of those that cut them.

I don’t know what you’re doing, or with whom, or why there is “cutting” involved, but this does not sound like conventional heterosexual sex to me.

As soon as the Fancy is touched, and the small Fibres of the Brain shaken by the Thoughts of Love, there is an internal Sweat in our Privy Parts, and the Spirits which rush thither with Precipitation, force out a limpid Liquor of the Prostate which prepares the Conduit for the Passage of the Seed. But when one is join’d amorously to a Woman, the 2 small Bladders, most ready for evacuation, empty

Okay. Gonna start calling it “The Fancy”!

Chapter 6: What Hour of the Day one ought to kiss one’s Wife.

Well… they’re still English.
 
Via John Overholt and Harvard Library

 
In this episode of “Moving Portraits: Title Shots,” we travel to Santa Cruz to learn how a lifetime of surfing and skating has shaped middleweight Luke Rockhold’s fighting style.

If you’ve ever spent any time in a California coastal town, you’ve probably noticed dozens of people heading for the beach to surf every morning at sunrise. It’s like they have to be there. Ever known a surfer who you wouldn’t describe as an adrenaline junkie? The thrill that comes from riding the breaks seems mighty addictive.

Surfing is the ultimate man against nature sport. The ultimate man against man sport—at least that which doesn’t involve actual weaponry—is mixed martial arts and Luke Rockhold, has mastered both. He’s also a skater and believes that it is his agility on the waves and on his deck informs his fighting style and stance.

Rockhold grew up surfing in Santa Cruz with his father and older brother pro surfer Matt “Rocky” Rockhold (long the face of Rip Curl). The waves there spawn the world’s best surfers, but as he mentions in the video below, Santa Cruz may appear to be a sleepy idyllic place, but it’s a fairly hard town, especially the beaches which can get very territorial between groups of surfers.

Luke Rockhold seems to have channeled his need for that adrenaline rush with his professional aspirations. As he admits in the portrait below, he was a wild and crazy, aggressive violent kid. Today the former Strikeforce Champion is #5 in the official Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight rankings.

On November 8th, Rockhold will be battling it out with British MMA fighter Michael Bisping at UFC’s UFC Fight Night 55 at the Allphones Arena in Sydney, Australia. If their hilariously shit-talking press conference is any indication, it ought to be a doozy!
 

 
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