Photo: Ben Heine
 
In this instructive video, New York-based artist Merrill Kazanjian conducts a tutorial in how to draw an Occupy Wall Street protester.

“All you will need is a pencil, some paper, a global recession and some corporate anger and you’ll be able to draw this handsome fellow.”
 

 
Home is where the art is for four different groups of writers, who lived and worked together under one roof, experiencing a cultural time-share that produced diverse and original works of literature, art, and popular entertainment.
 

 
The February House

Between 1940 and 1942, “an entire generation of Western culture” lived at 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn. The poet W. H. Auden was house mother, who collected rents and doled out toilet paper, at 2 sheets for each of his fellow tenants, advising them to use “both sides”. These tenants included legendary stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee, novelist Carson McCullers and a host of other irregular visitors - composer Benjamin Britten, singer Peter Pears, writers Jane and Paul Bowles and Erika and Klaus Mann, Salvador Dali, a selection of stevedores, sailors, circus acts and a chimpanzee.

Auden wrote his brilliant poem New Year Letter here and fell obsessively in love with Chester Kallman, and attempted to strangle him one hot, summer night - an event that taught Auden the universal potential for evil. On the top floor, Carson McCullers escaped from her psychotic husband, and wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, while slowly drinking herself to an early death.

On the first floor, Gypsy Rose Lee created her legend as the world’s most famous stripper, wrote her thriller The G-String Murders, offered a shoulder to cry on, and told outrageous tales of her burlesque life.

Known as the “February House”, because of the number of birthdays shared during that month, 7 Middagh St. was a place of comfort and hope in the desperate months at the start of the Second World War.
 

 
The Fun Factory

The scripts that came out of 9 Orme Court in London, changed world comedy. And if Spike Milligan hadn’t gone mad and attempted to murder Peter Sellers with a potato peeler, it may never have all happened.

Milligan was the comic genius behind The Goons, and the stress of writing a new script every week, led to his breakdown. The need for a place to work, away from the demands of family, home and fame, brought Milligan to share an office with highly successful radio scriptwriter, Eric Sykes. 

The first Fun Factory was above a greengrocer on the Uxbridge Road. Here Sykes, Milligan, comedian Frankie Howerd and agent Scruffy Dale, formed the Writers’ Bloc Associated London Scripts. The idea was to bring together the best and newest comedy writers under one umbrella. Milligan saw ALS as an artists’ commune that would lead to political and cultural change. Sykes saw ALS as a business opportunity to produce great comedy. Frankie Howerd saw it as a source of finding new material.

When Milligan asked two young writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to come on board, the central core of ALS was formed.

This merry band of writers expanded in the coming years to include: Johnny Speight (Till Death Us Do Part); Barry Took and Marty Feldman (The Army Game and Round the Horne); Terry Nation (Dr Who and the Daleks); John Antrobus (The Bed-Sitting Room); and with a move to the more suitable offices of 9 Orme Court, ALS was established as the home of legendary British comedy.

Milligan continued successfully with The Goons, before devising the groundbreaking Q series for television. Sykes began his long and successful career with his own TV show. While Galton and Simpson created the first British TV sitcom, Hancock’s Half-Hour, and then the massively influential Steptoe and Son.

9 Orme Court was once described, as though Plato, Aristotle, Galileo and Leonardo Da Vinci were all living in the same artist’s garret.
 

 
The Beat Hotel

A run-down hotel in the back streets of Paris was unlikely setting for a Cultural Revolution, but the Sixties were seeded when poet, Allen Ginsberg William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bryon Gysin moved into the Beat Hotel, at 9 Git le Coeur, in the late 1950s.

The literary revolution that started with Ginsberg’s Howl in America was formalised and expanded in the cramped, leaky, piss-smelling hotel rooms at 9 Git le Couer.

Ginsberg wrote part of Kaddish here, as he came to terms with the madness and death of his Mother. First to arrive, Ginsberg was also be first to check out, travelling in search of enlightenment to India. 

The wild and romantic Corso produced his best books of poems “Gasoline” and “Bomb”, whilst living the life of an American abroad.

But it was Burroughs who gained most from his four-year on-and-off stay in Git le Coeur.  Here he completed Naked Lunch, and wrote the novels The Soft Machine, The Nova Express, The Ticket that Exploded, and together with Bryon Gysin devised the cut-up form of writing, indulged in seances, Black Magic and tried out Scientology.

Like Middagh Street, the Beat Hotel was a cultural and social experiment that sought to inspire art through shared experiences. 
 
Passport from Pimlico

It started with a bet. Three young writers sitting watching Mick Jagger on Top of the Pops, in a flat in Pimlico during the 1960s. The bet was simple, which of the 3 would make the big time first?

It was the kind of idle chat once made soon forgotten, but not for these 3 young talents, Tom Stoppard, Derek Marlowe and Piers Paul Read.

Read and Marlowe believed Stoppard would hit the big time first, but they were wrong, it was Marlowe in 1966 with his cool and brilliant spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic, made into a film with Laurence Harvey, Mia Farrow, Tom Courtney and Peter Cook.

Stoppard was next in 1967, with his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Then Read with Alive the story of Andes plane crash in 1974.

All 3 were outsiders, set apart from their contemporaries by their romanticized sense of Englishness, which came from their backgrounds. Read was a brilliant Catholic author, favorably compared to Graham Greene; Stoppard, a Czech-émigré, and Marlowe, a second generation Greek, who was for “heroes, though if not Lancelot or Tristan, heroes” who appeared “out of the mould of the time.” All three writers were to become the biggest British talents of the 1970s and 1980s.
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

A Dandy in Aspic: A letter from Derek Marlowe

Alan Moore
 
Mustard Mag has delightful and downloadable PDFs of DIY papercraft dolls featuring all your favorite Britcom celebrities, including this week’s talkshow guests Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher from Snuff Box.

I love the Stewart Lee doll. Captures him well, I think. Not that he’s a blockhead or anything…

Download the PDFs here.

IT Crowd
 

Peep Show
 

 
Thank you, Steve Luc!

 
Celebrated British photographer David Bailey is swapping his camera for a paintbrush. Known since the swinging Sixties for his iconic black and white portraits of The Beatles, Peter Sellers, Michael Caine, Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger and London gangsters, the Kray Brothers; and his decades of fashion work, Bailey’s new show of his paintings, his first ever, is titled “Hitler Killed The Duck.”

Bailey was interviewed by Dazed Digital’s Sue-Wen Q:

Can you tell us the story behind the great title, ‘Hitler killed the Duck’?
David Bailey: The Germans bombed the cinema that I went to see Bambi and cartoons in with a V2 rocket in 1944, so I thought Hitler had killed all the Disney characters.

People tend to be drawn to religion during those times, but you’re not religious are you?
David Bailey: Of course not. God’s just a daisy on the sidewalk. There are many good religions; I like Taoism because it’s more a philosophy. The Carthars were interesting. They were Christians who didn’t believe in killing and that nonsense and were wiped out by the Catholics. I’m completely against capital punishment, because you could get it wrong and that’s enough not to do it.

More than half this country will bring it back because they don’t think; they watch football and get drunk every other night. There’s not a chance many times they’ve made a mistake and the state’s part of you so in a way, you become the killer. Similarly, we’re responsible for Blair, because we - I didn’t, but I’m still part of society - voted him in. So we have to live with that arsehole.

Any final words with regards to the exhibition?
David Bailey: Whether you like or not, there’s nothing I can do. There might be people, whose collection or view on the world I dislike, that end up buying something. That would be sad. Imagine if Hitler or Bush or General Mao or Stalin came along and bought one. All the arseholes in history are famous, weird, isn’t it?

You can see a gallery of some of Bailey’s new paintings on Dazed Digital. I’m a big David Bailey fan (a first edition of his 1969 book Goodbye Baby and Amen that wasn’t cheap sits behind me as I type this) but from what I have seen of it, I must say this new work doesn’t do much for me. Bailey claims he was influenced by Francis Bacon, but all I can see is the influence of German weirdo painter Blalla W. Hallmann, who did this same sort of thing much better. Bailey should probably stick to his Rolleiflex.

“Hitler killed the Duck” from October 7th to November 12, 2011 at Scream, 34 Bruton Street, London W1J 6QX

Below, a delightful David Bailey interview from 2010:
 

 
The great Ron English has pulled a fantastic Situationist-inspired cereal box détourné prank by placing comically altered boxes on the shelves of a Ralph’s in Venice Beach, CA.

If you find one of the boxes and contact him at his website, he’ll sign it for you.

Click here to see larger image.

(via Laughing Squid)

 
The fun and beauty of toys is they exist purely for pleasure… but within the most wonderful of toys there is poetry and secret teachings.

“Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.”  - Charles Eames.

Charles and Ray Eames made over 100 short films. Many of them had toys as their subject. In Tops (1969) and the solar powered Do-Nothing Machine (1957), the Eames celebrate design and movement for their own sake as well as their potential to open doors of perception. 

The Do-Nothing Machine was created by the Eames to do exactly what its name says - nothing. In the 1950s, when progress was our most important product, a machine that did nothing, other than dazzle the eye and compel one to meditate upon the beauty of form, sunlight and gravity, was a radical statement. Eames’ machine could be seen as a precursor to the psychedelic experience: a device to tickle the senses and bring us into the NOW. Add the fact that it is solar-powered and we have something that is positively visionary in all senses of the word.

In our goal-oriented society, a toy is a respite from getting things done. A toy is like the Buddha nature, it need not justify itself. It just is, of the moment, no results required, no function necessary other than in the delight of being. But within the playful nature of a toy, there are things to be learned if you so choose to discover them.

A top is perfect, profound in its simplicity, offering up a multitude of possible teachings. Truly alive when it is in balance, the top, spinning like a prayer wheel with a sense of humor, in accordance with natural law, is a symbol of the Dharma as it spins upon its invisible axis. The spine of the top is charged like some kind of tantric machine. With each new spin it is reborn.

Watch in wonder.
 

 
Clever area rugs printed with images from Google Earth by David Hanauer. According to his website, you can also turn it into wall-to-wall carpeting. I want a bird’s eye view rug of Occupy Wall Street in NYC. Make it happen David!

The project shows different patterns for a carpet / carpeted floor. It is about identity, new patterns, google, architecture. It reflects a new identity of products as well as humans and the interaction between them.

 

 
(via Public School)

 
Throughout the years I’ve seen these creepy, but amazing images on Tumblrs and various blogs but I never knew who the artist was. Coilhouse recently did a post on these human-animal hybrid x-rays and they’re by Italian artist Benedetta Bonichi. 

Check out the rest of Benedetta Bonichi’s work on her website To See in the Dark.
 

La Collana Di Perle - 2002
 

La Sirena - 2001
 
(via Coilhouse)

 
Snoop Dogg portrait made from marijuana, hash and joints by artist Jason Mecier. That’s $1,500 worth of THC on the canvas.

This will be on display and featured in the new book La Luz de Jesus 25, as part of the 25th Anniversary of La Luz de Jesus Gallery.

November 4–27
Opening receptions: November 4 & 5, 8–11 PM
La Luz de Jesus Gallery
4633 Hollywood Blvd Los Angeles, CA. 90027

 
In 1977, Roy Lichtenstein was commissioned by BMW to paint a Group 5 Racing Version of the BMW 320i as part of the BMW Art Car Project. He, along with 16 other artists, including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, have participated in the art campaign starting in 1975. The most recent artist was Jeff Koons who painted a BMW last year.

I wanted the lines I painted to be a depiction of the road showing the car where to go – the design also shows the countryside through which the car has traveled. One could call it an enumeration of everything a car experiences, only that this car reflects all of these things before actually having been on a road.” - Roy Lichtenstein

Pop poetry in motion.
 

 
More art cars after the jump…