It’s probably a wee bit early to post about Halloween-themed stuff, right? But hey, it might give you plenty of time to practice and master the skills that it took Shawn Feeney to carve this awesome Trout Mask Replica pumpkin. 

Feeney carved Beefheart in 2011 and writes:

Every Halloween, I carve into a pumpkin the likeness of a musician who died since the previous Halloween. The tradition began in 2008, and each jack-o-lantern is carved in 3D-style. Like those represented, the jack-o-lanterns soon decay and disappear, but the artifacts remain.

Last year he carved an Adam “MCA” Yauch pumpkin.
 

 

 
The New York Historical Society recently obtained some great “Old New York” photography—beautiful shots of the ladies from New York’s formerly infamous Meatpacking District. Though it’s now one of the trendiest (and most expensive) neighborhoods in the city, in the 1980s, the Meatpacking District was the most notorious destination for sex clubs, drugs and prostitution, particularly from trans people. Many of the sex clubs were even forcibly shut down during the height of the AIDS scare by the Koch administration.

It’s a contentious part of the city’s history, and although the characters who populated that part of town at night are long gone, Jeff Cowen’s photographs are proof that they once existed. From The Historical Society’s website:

When New-York Historical acquired these images, Jeff Cowen included a typewritten, four-page narrative he titled “The Drag Queen Stroll.”  In it, the artist details his subjects from their first-hand accounts and his point of view, utilizing an abrupt writing style that’s reminiscent of the Beat Generation.

Cowen maps “The Stroll” from 17th Street and 9th Avenue, running west to the Hudson River, to the southern edge of the Meatpacking District on Gansevoort. His writing draws on the rampant homelessness, drug use, prostitution, theft, and assault in this area at night, which serves as a sharp contrast to the union workers and family men who work in the meat markets and warehouses during the day. Cowen calls this area “a haven for the largest transvestite subculture on the east coast.” And with the advent of crack and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, he says “the cost of sin has never been higher.”

 

 

 

 

 
Via Animal

 
In 1984, I was fortunate to be present for something called the “Program For Progress,” a large-scale site-specific performance by the influential early industrial group Test Dept at the Cannon Street Railway Station in London. Test Dept were a group that were signed to Some Bizarre at the time and had a real buzz about them and the extravagant post-punk political pageantry of their live events. The band’s mainstay members were Angus Farquhar, Graham Cunnington, Paul Jamrozy, Paul Hines and Toby Burdon. (According to Wikipedia, comedian Vic Reeves also played bass in an early version of the group.)

Walking into this epic event was quite something. I recall there being performers jumping on trampolines and “Socialist Realism” imagery projected via slides and film projectors onto huge sail-like swaths of white cloth hung from the high ceilings of the railway station. If memory serves, there were also a few bekilted bagpipers walking around and tables set up for various organizations, including efforts to aid the striking miners. Although the event had the ostensible veneer of an “outlaw” event, there was obviously no way that a huge “happening” like this one could have taken place without the express consent of British Rail. The centerpiece attraction for all assembled was the pounding, uncompromising, militaristic sound of Test Dept.
 

 
I know this will probably make some people groan, but I experienced Test Dept’s audio-visual assault as something akin to Einstürzende Neubauten meets Laibach (if they were easier to pin down politically) meets “Stomp.” Perhaps that makes what they did that night sound uncool, but that’s not my intention. It was an amazing theatrical spectacle to witness, full of savage, precise teamwork. It was a massive metal—and mental—pounding assault, but frankly the sort of thing I’d rather experience live in a concert setting than listen to at home.

The striking political content of the group’s ethos was summed up in one of their songs, “Voice of Reason,” in a text written by radical English playwright Jonathan Moore:

” ... A government that closes hospitals and opens nuclear air bases, that conspicuously favours its wealthy, its corrupt, its immoral citizens, while denying basic human rights to the majority. Extreme conditions demand extreme responses.”

Those extreme conditions were just beginning in 1984. The influential Test Dept broke up in 1993, but reformed again last year for a show in Belgium.

“Fuckhead” from The Unacceptable Face of Freedom album is a real stunner from their catalog.
 

“Kick to Kill” from 1984’s Beating the Retreat
 

“Shockwork” from 1983.
 
Below, a clip from the very Cannon Street Station performance described above, as seen on the South of Watford television program:
 

Don’t ask…

And now for my second TIL (“today I learned”) moment (the first was that whole Ronnie James Dio being the singing cartoon frog thing): Apparently there is a subculture (what else would you call it?) of Christian balloon animal performers. They will come to your kid’s parties, Bible camp, Sunday school, nursing home, whatever, and they will tell a Bible story, with a colorful “twist”—make that several!!—that will delight both young and old alike.

Or some bullshit. In any case, yes, there are professional Christian balloon twisters. It seems like an odd ambition to me, but you can buy books and DVDs about it and some of the more established Christian balloon performers are even giving away some of their classic material for newbies who want to spread “the good word” through the art of balloon twisting. If that’s what you’re into.
 

Tilda Swinton as the balloon Mary
 

Swamp Thing?
 

I said don’t ask…
 

Moe Howard died for somebody’s sins but not mine…
 

Life-sized!
 

Nice try?

Thank you kindly, Psychcomm!

 
As one does, right? Looking like a cross between Leigh Bowery and a whacked-out Vegas showgirl, South African performance artist, Steven Cohen thought it would be a reasonable idea to dress in a bird-like costume with a rooster tied to his penis on a long ribbon and shimmy around the Eiffel Tower. Why not? Lots of reasons…

“He danced with the cock for around ten minutes, before being arrested by the police,” his lawyer Agnes Tricoire told French daily Le Parisien.

Cohen was held by Paris police on charges of indecent exposure.

His lawyer expressed her disgust with the duration of his arrest, telling Le Parisien: “It’s a disgrace. With this performance, Steven Cohen wanted to evoke his situation, split between two countries.”

“South Africa, his native land, and France, where he lives at the moment,” she explained. “France is throwing artists in prison,” she added.

Cohen was released Tuesday evening and is expected to appear in court on December 16th.

Sadly, there is no video evidence.

Via Arbroath

 
I don’t know who the hell Wes Naman is or how he came up with this crazy idea, but the results speak for themselves. The freakishly distorted visages of his curiously likable bunch of rebellious chums—well, I won’t forget them for quite some time. I wonder what they “really” look like…..
 

 

 

 

 
I think Naman has really stumbled onto something here—can this become a thing, please?

See more of these startling pics at Naman’s website.

 
When William S. Burroughs’ novella “Ah Pook Is Here” was published in 1979, it was in a form greatly diminished from the authors’ original intent. That’s not a typo, because although it was Burroughs who wrote the text that was published, there were two creators of the far more elaborate work that it was cleaved from, Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill, a then 23-year-old illustrator.

Burroughs’ apocalyptic text tells the story of a megalomaniac bastard (an “Ugly American” based on a powerful media tycoon like William Randolph Hearst or Henry Luce) who acquires the powers of the Mayan death god, Ah Puch. Conceived as “continuous panorama,” with accordion-style, linked pages in the pictographic format of the surviving Mayan codices—“an early comic book” as per Burroughs—the project, seven years in the making, consisted of over 100 detailed illustrations by McNeill, 30 in full color, and about 50 pages of text. “Ah Puch is Here” (as it was originally titled) would have been prohibitively expensive to publish at the time, but it was also rather racy and sexually explicit—including male on male imagery—meaning the pool of potential publishers was certainly very, very small to begin with.
 

 
As Burroughs wrote in the forward to the 1979 book:

“[O]ver the years of our collaboration Malcolm McNeill produced more than a hundred pages of artwork. However, owing partly to the expense of full color reproduction, and because the book falls into neither the category of the conventional illustrated book, nor that of a comix publication, there have been difficulties with the arrangements for the complete work. The book is in fact unique…”

That it was. “Ah Puch is Here” wouldn’t have been the first graphic novel—Burroughs’ own American publisher Grove Press had already put out Guy Peellaert and Pierre Barther’s Adventures of Jodelle as well as Massins’ graphic interpretation of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano... There was Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella, Michael O’Donoghue’s The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, Guido Crepax’s “Valentina” series, The Adventures of Tintin, lots of stuff comes to mind, but in the main these books were collections of episodic comic strips, not “serious” narratives originally conceived of to fit between two book covers or that would have required luxurious glossy printing to properly display the highly detailed Hieronymous Bosch-inspired photorealistic artwork within… Unique yes, then as now.
 

 
Burroughs collaboration with McNeill began in 1970, when the author was living in London and McNeill was an art student. Without any communication between them, McNeil illustrated Burroughs’ submissions to Cyclops magazine, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” and impressed him enough so that he wanted to meet the young artist. (It’s worth noting that McNeil scarcely had any idea who Burroughs was at the time, even so, he drew Mr. Hart, the villain, to look a lot like a younger version of El Hombre Invisible.)
 

 
After a year of museum research and preliminary design on a mockup, Rolling Stone’s Straight Arrow Books imprint agreed to publish the “Ah Puch” book and McNeil moved to San Francisco to work on it. Straight Arrow was shuttered in 1974 and eventually the project was abandoned before the text portion alone saw the light of day in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts in 1979. Malcolm McNeil went on to a distinguished career as an illustrator for the likes of National Lampoon, Marvel Comics and The New York Times and a motion graphics designer and director for film, advertising and television, including winning an Emmy for his work for Saturday Night Live. (This will be of interest to no one save for fellow vets of the 1980s New York advertising world, but McNeil’s Paintbox work was synonymous with Charlex, the NYC-based video production house probably best known for The Cars’ “You Might Think” video, dozens of TV show openings and hundreds of commercials.)

After some 30 years in storage, the by now fragile “Ah Puck is Here” artwork was restored by Malcolm McNeill for exhibition, and was shown at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, the Saloman Arts Gallery in Manhattan and elsewhere.
 

 
Fantagraphics have published two separate Ah Pook books, one a gorgeous coffee table book of McNeil’s extraordinary panoramic illustrations for the Burroughs collaboration, The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here: Images from the Graphic Novel and a memoir, Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me, an intimate, affectionate portrait of their unlikely friendship and multi-year/multi-continent joint project.

The first book has very little text, and although it’s impossible to make heads or tails out of what is going on with the drawings alone, trust me, you get a very good sense of the epicness of the vision and also see some of what would have made 99% of the publishers of the 1970s very squeamish. Sadly, for reasons McNeil politely declines to go too far in-depth about, he was denied the use of Burroughs’ text for the Fantagraphics publication by his estate and this is a real shame.

However, if you have a copy of truncated 1979 Ah Pook Is Here (I do) it becomes an even more satisfying excuse to dive in deeply on the detective work and match passages from the text to the artwork. If you’re interested enough to purchase the coffee table book, surely you are going to have to rush over to eBay or ABEBooks and get yourself a copy of Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts, just bear that in mind.
 

 
Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me, the memoir and the third book in this trilogy, is no less essential for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of what made Burroughs tick, and should, along with the artwork that was regretfully parted from WSB’s text, be seen as one of the most exciting things to come along in Burroughs scholarship in recent years. It is, by far, the most observational—and highly personal/subjective, which makes it fun—look at Burroughs produced by any of his friends or collaborators. McNeil is a fine writer—the man must be a superb raconteur—and he never forgets who the book is really about.

I must say, as a longtime William Burroughs fanatic, I was wowed by McNeil’s twinned Fantagraphics books (which are beautiful matching objects) and spellbound by his tales of working with Burroughs. There are really three books here that you need, so it’s not a cheap proposition to acquire the lot, but if you’re a big Burroughs fanboy, it’s certainly well worth the expense.

Furthermore, if you’re so inclined Malcolm McNeil is selling very reasonably priced limited edition prints of several of his incredible “Ah Pook” panels.
 

 

The Dead City Radio recording of Burroughs reading “Ah Puck is Here” provides the soundtrack to this amazing short animated film directed by Philip Hunt with music by John Cale.

 
In 1976 Spire Comics, publisher of Christian-themed comic books, many of them involving Archie and his friends, came out with “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” which told the life story of Johnny Cash and the start of his musical career, the breakup of his first marriage, his battle with pills, a jail stint, and his eventual marriage to June Carter. Johnny Cash traditionally started his concerts with the phrase “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” before breaking into “Folsom Prison Blues.”

The material’s hokey, of course, but the art isn’t half-bad—just like a real comic book, y’know. Not nearly as cringeworthy as it could have been. It’s credited as being written by Johnny Cash with Billy Zeoli and Al Hartley—one wonders how involved Johnny actually was.

Here are some panels from “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” for your enjoyment. (Does anyone know if Johnny ever played Pisa? This Johnny Cash concert database suggests that he never played Italy. Anybody know?)
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
You can download the entire comic book in PDF format here.

Here’s a video of a Johnny Cash fan free-associating over some stills of the comic book. Be sure to catch the reference to President Obama!

 
A young, pre-Soft Cell Marc Almond and friends made this amazing and amusing short college film at Leeds Polytechnic in 1978.

It’s equal parts Pink Narcissus, Modesty Blaise, Barbarella and (very) early John Waters. You might even say it’s like a (super) low-budget Matthew Barney film.

Marc’s precocious preoccupations with sleaze and S&M bondage gear were in full evidence here.

Dig that space-age hookah.
 

 
Part II after the jump…
 

 
The book Bad Graffiti by Scott Hocking is a celebration of craptastic graffiti spotted in and around abandoned properties in Detroit, Michigan.

“Bad graffiti can be vulgar, juvenile, poorly scrawled, misspelled, ignorant, sexist, racist and ridiculous,” Hocking writes in the prologue from the book. “Yet, it can also be… so bad, it’s good.”
 

 

 

 
More photos after the jump…