Dom Perignon commissioned the Design Laboratory at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art & Design to create an Andy Warhol-inspired champagne bottle. The result is rather predictable. But, what would one expect?
Six different styles of bottle art were created in Warhol’s favorite colors of blue, red, violet, emerald green, lilac and yellow. Dom Perignon are only making these bottles available in Spain. Which is fine by me. I’m waiting for the release of the limited edition Boone’s Farm R. Crumb tribute.
John Callahan, known for his dark, crude and morbidly funny cartoons has died.
Considering the shitty hand that life dealt him and the shit he brought upon himself, it’s a miracle that Callahan found anything funny. He never knew his birth parents and as a child was sexually molested by a female teacher. He turned to alcohol at the age of 14 to deal with the pain of having been abused. A full-blown alcoholic by the age of 21, he was involved in a car accident when the driver, a friend, ran the vehicle into a lightpole at 90mph. The crash severed Callahan’s spine, leaving him a quadriplegic.
What was a potentially hopeless situation became a profound turning point in Callahan’s life. He gave up booze and became an artist. After a long period of physical therapy he was able to hold a pen in his hand. He started creating the cartoons that brought him notoriety and fans like Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Bill Plympton and Gary Larson. His autobiography ‘Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot’ became a bestseller.
Callahan was 59 when he died on July 24th. The causes were complications of quadriplegia and respiratory problems. His politically incorrect slaps at the status quo and unflinching honesty will be missed. John was the kind of turd in the punchbowl that keeps us from drinking the Koolaid.
‘I Think I was An Alcoholic’ was animated by Callahan and ‘Touch Me Some Place I Can Feel’ is a clip from a documentary of the same name about Callahan.
see ‘Touch Me Some Place I Can Feel’ after the jump…
French graphic designer Metastazisand Polish artist Zbiniew M. Blielak combined forces to create this poster for Swedish metal band Watain. Instead of conventional screenprint ink, they used human blood. Metastazis describes his art as being ‘scandalous yet refined.’ The Watain poster lives up to his credo.
A rat rod is an old car or truck, usually from the 1920s thru to the 50s, that’s been stripped down and rebuilt using parts that date from the same era as the original automobile. A rat rod may be seriously stripped down, without hoods or fenders. They’re the punk rock rods of the hot rod scene, expressing the individuality of their owners. Aesthetically, the more rust the better.
I shot these at The Lonestar Rod And Custom Roundup in Austin this year. Music is by The Damned, Mink DeVille and The Modern Lovers.
A lot of a young cats in the Chicano community in Austin are rat rod aficionados.
The first video features a particularly groovy rusty rat rod tricked out with hydraulics and a Jack Daniels bottle containing radiator coolant. This is a low rider for people with exceptional style.
The second video contains rat motorcycles and more rat rods.
Two cool Andy Warhol items came to my attention today that I wanted to share here. First of all, the charming letter sent to the artist in 1964 by William MacFarland, the Product Marketing Manager of the Campbell Soup Company, congratulating him on the success of his then young career and offering to send over a couple of cases of tomato soup.
The video below is a 90 second condensation of the 23 minutes Warhol spent painting a BMW M1 race car. Roy Lichtenstein and Alexander Calder also painted “art cars” for the German auto giant.
Exene Cervenka, the director of photography and co-writer on Modi Frank’s 1986 silent western Bad Day, is making the film available on her website to help raise money for Gulf Coast residents.
Shot at a secret location near Chatsworth, California, the short film features an inspired cast of irregulars playing the residents of a small town on a bad day. Call it what you will: a cow-punk time capsule, a mock-Western, a guerrilla film forerunner – or just plain proof of a time when everyone didn’t take themselves so seriously.
“Bad Day” has a cool cast that includes, John Doe (X), Dave Alvin (Blasters), Kevin Costner, Michael Blake and Chris Desjardin (The Flesheaters).
A portion of the proceeds from “Bad Day” are going to the Gulf Coast aid organization the Committee for Plaquemines Recovery that helps the people affected in the Gulf region.
Now available for the first time as a digital download Viewers will be able to “pay” whatever they choose for the download. Please view at www.baddaymovie.com
Doel, Belgium, a town known mostly for it’s proximity to nuclear reactors, has become a virtual ghost town. Fortunately, radiation didn’t figure into Doel’s fate. The townspeople of Doel were forced to move in order to accommodate the expansion of Antwerp harbor. Other than a handful of diehard citizens, a few businesses, and squatters, the town is uninhabited and will soon be demolished. In the meantime, Doel has become a huge canvas for artists. Cesare Santorini made this short film documenting the incredible and ephemeral street art of Doel.
I wish Santorini’s choice of music in this video had been better. You may want to turn down the volume.
Over at J-Walk Blog I stumbled across the most awesome of awesome web sites, Yvette’s Bridal Forum. One of the commenters at J-Walk sums up this delightful little goldmine perfectly, “It’s the ultimate anti-aesthetic shock site. Sort of like Goatse, but for web designers.”
By 1937, surrealism was in its second decade as a movement. Its artists and filmmakers were making inroads into London and New York galleries, and becoming media stars. The surrealist bug also bit on the West Coast, and underground gatherings like the Hollywood Film and Foto League screened European avant-garde films regularly.
Such gatherings attracted politically minded actor Harry Hay and Works Progress Administration (WPA) photographers Roger Barlow and LeRoy Robbins. After seeing a magazine ad for a short film contest, these jokers sprung into action, making Even—As You and I, a short depicting themselves as broke filmmakers who cobble together clichés from their fave avant-garde films into a dorky film-within-a-film spoof called The Afternoon of a Rubber Band. In a “D’oh!”-style ending, the three realize they’ve missed the contest’s midnight deadline.
A damn clever little underground film moment. Hay—the curly-haired guy in the group—would go on to become the godfather of gay activism, founding the Mattachine Society in the early’50s and the Radical Faeries in the early ‘70s.
