Dave Davies’ unusual self-portrait for MOJO is accompanied by his equally colorful description of himself:
I would describe myself as… handsome, sexy, 5ft 10 and a half, 12-and-a-half stone. Dark hair. Inventor. Metaphysician. Musician. Innovator. Gorgeous. Intelligent. Fabulous father. Loving, compassionate, kind. Generous. Modest. Humble. Magnetic personality. Generally wonderful.
Bob Dylan’s self-portrait was probably a bit better, but who knows, maybe Dave will grow into it!
Curious Alice was an anti-drug PSA made back in 1971 by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Its message is somehow lost through all the cool animations and funs.
The film shows Alice as she toured a strange land where everyone had chosen to use drugs, forcing Alice to ponder whether drugs were the right choice for her. The “Mad Hatter” character represents Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD), the “Dormouse” represents sleeping pills, and the “King of Hearts” represents heroin.
Yeah, I would file this one under the “failing miserably” [Dials drug dealer].
Like Spam, cheeseburgers-in-a-can, whole chickens-in-a-can, this 12-course meal in a can by designer Chris Godfrey skeeves me out. Even though it’s not an actual product sold in stores (yet!)—it’s Godfrey poking fun at gimmickry in contemporary culture—I wouldn’t be shocked if this caught on and became a… thing. Because…well, this is America, that’s why.
Here’s what the 12-course canned meal consists of:
- Selection of local cheeses with sourdough bread
- Pickled kobe beef with charred strawberry
- Ricotta ravioli with a soft egg yolk
- Shiitake mushroom topped with filled peppers
- Halibut poached in truffle butter in a coconut crepe
- Risotto foraged ramps, prosciutto and fresh parmesan
- French onion soup with fresh thyme and gruyere cheese
- Roast pork belly and celeriac root puree
- Palate cleanser, pear ginger juice
- Rib eye steak with grilled mustard greens
- Crack pie with milk ice cream on a vanilla tuile
- French canele with a malt barley and hazelnut latte
The Pop Art genius was born on August 6, 1928 and died, prematurely, probably due to hospital incompetence after a routine gall bladder operation, on February 22, 1987 at the age of 58.
Here’s what Andy Warhol had to say about death:
I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish, and everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn’t be there. I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph and no name.
Well, actually, I’d like it to say “figment.”
I remember vividly when Andy Warhol died. As a New Yorker myself, it truly felt like it was the end of an era. After Warhol died, New York’s fabled nightlife took a nosedive (there were other important factors, too, like AIDS, of course). It wasn’t like you’d be able to see Warhol at a party, a fashion show, a nightclub or a restaurant ever again and think to yourself “Oh, Andy Warhol’s here. I must be in the very best party in Manhattan tonight.”
That was kind of what Warhol’s stamp of approval meant to New Yorkers. His presence alone made you feel cool. I met Warhol several times—as fate would have it, the first time was on the very day I moved to New York, at the Area nightclub. The infamous homicidal club kid king, Michael Alig, then a 18-year-old college student, asked me if I’d like to meet Andy Warhol. “Sure!” I replied and then Michael (who I had just met) proceeded to shove me—HARD, using both arms—into the artist, nearly knocking him down. Warhol just shrugged it off and blamed Michael anyway as he’d seen the whole thing go down. After that incident, I’d see Warhol around every few weeks for the next couple of years.
When he died so suddenly, I cannot stress this enough, it was like a pall had come over the city. New York would just never be quite the same ever again.
The first sign that there was something wrong with Andy Warhol, that he might be a mortal being after all, came three weeks ago. It was a Friday night, and after dinner with friends at Nippon, he was planning to see Outrageous Fortune, eat exactly three bites of a hot-fudge sundae at Serendipity, buy the newspapers, and go to bed. At dinner, though, he felt a pain. It was a sharp, bad pain, and rather than let anyone see him suffer, he excused himself. And as soon as he got home, the pain went away.
“I’m sorry I said I had to go home,” Warhol told Pat Hackett a few days later as he narrated his daily diary entry to her over the phone. “I should have gone to the movie, and no one would ever have known.”
In fact, no one remembered. And if anyone suspected trouble, it was dispelled the next week by Warhol’s ebullient spirits at the Valentine’s dinner for 30 friends that he held at Texarkana with Paige Powell, the young woman who was advertising director of Interview magazine by day and Warhol’s favorite date by night. Calvin Klein had sent him a dozen or so bottles of Obsession, and before Warhol set them out as party favors for the women, he drew hearts on them and signed his name. On one for ballerina Heather Watts he went further, inscribing the word the public never associates with Andy Warhol: “Love.”
Excerpt from “The World of Warhol” by Jesse Kornbluth, from the March 9, 1987 issue of New York Magazine.
The Figment Project, sponsored by the Andy Warhol Museum and EarthCam has a live look at the artist’s actual grave site in Pittsburgh today.
Below, art critic “Brian Badonde” (BAFTA-winner comedic genius Kyvan Novak) visits Bandy’s childhood home in Pittsburgh on Facejacker:
H. H. Richardson Complex/Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, Buffalo, New York
In the U.S. prior to the early 1960s there was a government-run system of mental institutions, some housed in grand Gothic Victorian buildings with impressive grounds. Following changes in psychiatric treatment and the deregulation and privatization of the mental health industry, many of these structures were simply abandoned. For decades they have stood empty, too expensive to demolish. The Kennedy administration planned to act on recommendations from the National Institute of Mental Health to replace these asylums with 2000 outpatient community mental health centers (one for every 100,000 people) by 1980, only a fraction of which were ever built.
Photographers have captured these old asylums in varying states of decay.
Many of the patient rooms in the central wing [at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital] still contain beds and furniture, and in the northern wing, many still contain belongings. This suggests relatively rapid abandonment, and the fact that apparently usable beds, refrigerators, and other furniture and appliances were not removed for use in other buildings or state facilities helps to confirm this.
Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Weston, West Virginia
This West Virginia asylum is now a tourist attraction, hosting ghost tours, historical tours, an asylum ball, and stage production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. According to the official website, “The Asylum has had apparition sightings, unexplainable voices and sounds, and other paranormal activity reported in the past by guests, staff, SyFy’s Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters Academy, the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures and Paranormal Challenge.”
Overbrook Asylum/Essex County Hospital Center, Cedar Grove, New Jersey
The hospital was laid out at the bottom of a hill atop which sat the Mountain Sanatorium – a facility used at various times to treat tuberculosis patients, wayward children, and drug abusers. These two facilities, and the many abandoned buildings associated with them, became Essex County’s most legendary location, home to escaped lunatics, troubled ghosts, and roving gangs of ne’er do wells. For a generation of North Jersey teens, a visit to the Overbrook site was a rite of passage – going to “The Asylum,” “The Bin,” or “The Hilltop”, as it was called by various gangs of teens, was a surefire way to test your mettle and impress your friends.
Unlike other abandoned asylums with patients’ personal possessions scattered all over the building, the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in New York unwittingly maintained a goldmine for historians. The hospital kept the unclaimed suitcases of all patients who passed away there from the 1910’s to the 1960’s. When the facility closed in 1995 hundreds of intact suitcases were discovered in a locked attic space. These have been preserved by the New York State Museum and added to its permanent collection. Photographer Jon Crispin was permitted to document each suitcase’s contents, resulting in a fascinating but melancholy series of photos of patients’ personal items. You get the feeling most people assumed they would only be staying at the asylum temporarily.
Preserved suitcase of a mental patient at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane, New York
Crispin said:
Originally, doctors thought that all you had to do was remove people from the stresses and strains of society, give them a couple of years to get their life together, and they’d get better. Eventually people realized they needed facilities where patients could come and never leave. There’s some question as to whether or not the patients themselves packed their suitcases, or if their families did it for them. But the suitcases sent along with them generally contained whatever the incoming patient wanted or thought they might need.
From 1976 to the mid-1980’s, Linder Sterling (born Linda Mulvey) was the matriarch and muse of the Manchester, England punk and post-punk music and art scenes. She was part of the mortar that held these scenes together, based somewhat at her home in the Whalley Range area of Manchester. She knew everyone, and apparently inspired nearly everyone she knew. She was the inspiration for The Buzzcocks’ “What Do I Get?” and her long-time BFF Morrissey’s “Cemetery Gates.” She met Morrissey at the soundcheck at The Sex Pistols’ 1976 show in Manchester that Morrissey later described in disappointing terms. He interviewed her for a fanzine in 1979 and she has been a steadfast influence in his life since his pre-Smiths days.
But the lovely Linder is more than a muse. She is a musician, pioneering visual artist, and performance artist in her own right.
As early as her art school days at Manchester Polytechnic Linder created some of the most recognizable posters, flyers, 45 sleeves, and LP covers in the U.K. music scene. She also created her own art, music (with her band Ludus) and her own much imitated collage style.
Ludus was formed by Linder and guitarist Arthur Kadmon, later joined by drummer Toby Tomanov and bassist Willie Trotter in 1978. They played the same Manchester venues as the burgeoning Smiths, such as Factory and The Haçienda. The Haçienda was the location of another of her art installations in conjunction with a Ludus show in November 1982, where a stained tampon and a stubbed out cigarette were placed on a paper plate on each of the tables at the venue. This piece, as well as her “menstrual jewelry,” is reminiscent of American artist Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse “Menstruation Bathroom” exhibit at the California Institute of the Arts in 1972, which managed to freak viewers out simply by including a trash can full of sanitary napkins painted red.
Also at this show, over twenty years before Lady Gaga, Linder was the first woman to wear a dress made out of meat. She wore a net dress with offal from a nearby Chinese restaurant sewn in. Members of The Crones distributed additional chunks of offal wrapped in pages from pornographic magazines to audience members. During the song “Too Hot To Handle” (video available here with no sound) Linder pulled up her skirt to reveal an enormous black dildo (an actual buzzcock!).
Her juxtaposition of men’s and women’s magazines, segregated by cars/DIYhome improvement/fitness/porn and beauty/fashion/homemaking/crafts, was used on the Buzzcocks’ “Orgasm Addict” 45 sleeve featuring a naked woman with her head replaced by a clothes iron and mouths in place of her nipples as well as Magazine’s debut LP Real Life. With the exception of a few upscale lifestyle magazines (most of which could easily be retitled Affluent Asshole Monthly), any media merchandiser with a corporate plan-o-gram can tell you that not much has changed since then as far as gender segregation. In fact, now we have the fitness magazines aimed at women (fitness always = weight loss) and more hot rod and hunting publications aimed at men than we did in the late 1970’s.
This ironic presentation of gender-specific media, particularly ubiquitous vintage images from the 1940’s to the early 1960’s, has been copied the world over in zines, flyers, and record sleeves. In fact, Linder and writer Jon Savage can be credited with literally inventing the now quite tired cut-and-paste zine aesthetic in their glossy fanzine, The Secret Public.
Curiously, Linder’s self-portraits using found media images (“I have always treated myself as a found object.”) almost always hide her mouth. When Morrissey asked her about this in an interview for Interview in 2010, she explained:
The mouth can betray in two ways—by what goes in and what comes out. I am not one of nature’s chatterboxes—but neither do I mumble. As time goes by, I have less and less desire to speak. And the number of people to whom I might address my select and diminishing group of words is likewise dwindling. My internal monologue keeps me busy enough. You once said that you felt as though you had read everything; I sometimes feel as though I have said and heard enough. I cheer the blank page. And central to my own work has always been the fact that women have more than one pair of lips.
She also described her self-image while she was growing up in Liverpool:
My mother was a cleaner in a hospital for nearly all of her working life. She used to have nightmares that she couldn’t get her windows clean, and so she couldn’t see through them. I grew up in that psychic force field. I can relate to the chill in Alan Bennett’s comment about a certain kind of Lancashire widow, who “tidied her husband into the grave.” But how might cleanliness look? Genteel? Pretty? Like art? As a child I begged for piano lessons, but pianos were dismissed as “dust harborers.” I wanted ballet lessons, too, but there weren’t any teachers in our part of Liverpool. Culture called—and Billy Fury answered via the radio. I grew up with pop, and pop will die as you and I die—if not before. When I was young, everything was neat and tidy, except for me. I have never felt clean inside, and I never felt beautiful.
Linder’s photography book, Morrissey Shot, was published in 1992. Her artwork has been displayed and/or performed all over Europe, including Paris’ Musee D’Art Moderne, the Cleveland Gallery in London, Sorcha Dallas gallery in Glasgow, the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, and the Tate St. Ives in southwest England.
For those of you who have never been to Los Angeles, this video pretty much captures the essence of the City of Angels. This is what LA—or large chunks of it, at least—really looks like.
For those of you who used to live in L.A. or haven’t visited in some time, you’ll probably find it nostalgic.
Yoko Ono’s films tend to deal with themes of sexuality, intimacy, and the navigation of public life. 1969’s Rape is arguably her most famous work, a disturbing first-person perspective from the eyes of the film crew, who chase, harass, and assault a German woman as she flees through the streets of London. No doubt the film is a commentary on the sudden media onslaught she experienced in the initial stages of her relationship with John Lennon. It’s an incredibly compelling piece.
It’s also 77 damn minutes long, and since I know you’re all reading this at work, I’ll hook you up with one of Ono’s briefer film experiments.
In Freedom, we see a shot of Ono’s chest in a silky purple bra. Faceless, she attempts to unhook the front claps in slow motion to the sound of modulating, electronic drone, (provided by John Lennon, of course). While it’s not unheard of to see a close-up of breasts on celluloid, the speed and sounds of the shot transform a mundane ritual of taking off a bra into a sort of post-modern dirge. The bra is never removed on camera, and the audience is left in a state of anticipation, as the clinical, hypnotic feel of the film belies all the general comfort we associate with breasts, whether maternal or sexual.
