‘Funeral.’
 
With just an ordinary ballpoint pen, the kind we’ve all used to scribble down classroom notes or phone numbers for possible Friday night dates, Toronto-based artist Rebecca Yanovskaya creates exquisite, magical worlds filled with mythical beings and characters out of creepy old folktales (Bluebeard) which she then blings up with a lot of 22 karat gold leaf.

Yanovskaya has been drawing with a ballpoint pen since middle school and she finds it easier to use when bringing her imagination to life on the page. She usually starts off by sketching out her picture with a Bic Crystal on Moleskine paper. Then she fills out the background before working her way forward to the heart of the action. This allows her time to get a feel for how much light and shade the finished image will contain.

What I love about pen is that I can always jump back and forth to any area of the piece that I want to work on and not worry about smudging or messing up dark/light layers.

As for influences, Yanovskaya takes her lead from painters like the Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha, the English Neo-Classicist John William Godward, and more obviously because of his use of gold leaf, her own personal favorite the Symbolist Gustav Klimt. She also pulls in ideas from her interest in horror, fantasy, and mythology—of which Yanokovskaya has said:

Mythology to me has always been about bigger than life struggles, and a world which is better than life, more idealized. The personalities are strong, exaggerated, passionate, heroic, beautiful. These are all qualities I want to capture through my art.

Once the picture is all drawn out, Yanovskaya adds the gold leaf to create the final image—which is exquisite and utterly enchanting.

Some of Yanovskaya’s artworks are available on a selection of clothing and she has also produced illustrations for the Netflix series Shadowhunters as well as a commerative coin design for the Canadian Mint. See more of Rebecca Yanovskaya’s work here.
 

‘Paso Doble.’
 

‘Bluebeard’s Bride—Chapter One.’
 
See more of Rebecca Yanovskaya’s amazing art, after the jump…
 

An eerie painting by Jaroslav Panuška,1907.
 
Czechoslovakian artist Jaroslav Panuška started his art career sometime around 1887 after becoming a student at an art academy in Prague run by Julius Mařák. Mařák, a talented Czech landscape painter, ran the school which is often referred to as the “Mařák’s School,” between 1887 and 1889 while Panuška and approximately 50 other students studied under him. Mařák’s goal was to enable his students to convey their inner emotions while observing nature in its purest form in order to see its “soul.” This approach deeply resonated with Panuška and it became the artist’s calling card for his entire career.

Sometime in the early 1900’s, Panuška illustrated a book with unsettling and dark fairy-tale like imagery. He would often incorporate typical fantasy characters like dragons, giants, and witches into his drawings. During this period, Panuška also began to reveal a much more sinister side of nature where ghosts and death were omnipresent, and the tranquil ponds full of lily pads were home to monsters lurking in the muck beneath. Panuška’s paintings and other artwork are coveted by collectors, and much of his large body of work is held in private collections. However, the artist’s most prized works are the ones that were done while he was seemingly under a heady spell that compelled him to conjure up images of creatures that only existed in stories or perhaps nightmares.

A beautiful-looking book on Panuška containing many examples of his art, Jaroslav Panuška 1872-1958: A Guide to Life and Work, can be purchased here for around $50. In other interesting news concerning Panuška, in 2014 old-school Czech black metal band Master’s Hammer released a song about the artist titled “Panuška” which directly referenced the work the he did during his dark mystical period, 56 years after he drew his last breath. Images from Panuška’s spooky days as well as an audio upload of Master’s Hammer and their black metal homage to the great painter below.
 

“Spirit of the Dead Mother” 1900.
 

“Baba Yaga.”
 
More after the jump…

Kaufman wrestling Deborah Croce on the Staten Island Ferry. Photo: Bob Mantin
 
As as true of Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman’s most noteworthy live appearance occurred at Carnegie Hall. The date of the gig was April 26, 1979, and the show could fairly be described as the most complete summation of Kaufman’s career. He ended the evening by taken many dozens of the audience members out for milk and cookies and continued the “performance” the next day on the Staten Island Ferry, treating the random stragglers who showed up to ice cream cones.

The show was filmed and released as a VHS cassette at some point, and now we’ve got a pretty decent upload on YouTube. I won’t reveal any of the gags here—you can see those for yourself—but will supply a few observations.

The show opens with Tony Clifton singing the National Anthem (badly) and then regaling the audience with a few observations and another song until he is forcibly removed from the stage. We’ve all had two solid years of observing Donald Trump in excruciating detail; I don’t think Trump’s similarities to Tony Clifton have been emphasized enough.

The opening act is the Love Family, a cloyingly sweet family who sings “The Age of Aquarius.” Kaufman apparently encountered them at Venice Beach in L.A. The choice of opener shows the tougher side of Kaufman’s humor—it seems that the Love family members were genuinely crushed when the audience started showing its displeasure with the act. According to Gregg Sutton, a friend of Kaufman’s, “For the first time in history, the audience wanted more Clifton!” (Crushed or no, they gamely rejoined Kaufman at the end of the show for a second round of bows.)

Robin Williams, who participated in the show, captured something essential about Kaufman’s milk and cookies stunt when he called it “P.T. Barnum meets Jung”:

“People who were heavily into hardcore drugs were going, ‘Oh, this is nice!’ This wasn’t party till you puke—this was milk and cookies! It was Howdy Buddha time.”

 
Continues after the jump…

A close look at one of Blitzway’s new “Hannibal Lecter” figures. YIKES!
 
If you are a fan and collector of action figures, then I have some excellent news for you. Korean company Blitzway has created a figure homaging one of the most insidiously evil villains in cinematic history, “Dr. Hannibal Lecter” from the 1991 film, The Silence of the Lambs. I’m sure you recall that Lecter was played with horrifying precision by veteran actor Sir Anthony Hopkins in the movie—and Blitzway has outdone themselves by bringing Hopkins’ portrayal of the cannibalistic, Chianti and fava beans enthusiast to life so to speak.

There are two different versions of the Hannibal figure; one features Lecter dressed in his immaculate white prisoner uniform (pictured at the top of this post) and comes with several accessories including the not-so-good doctor’s illustrations of “Clarice Starling,” (played Jodie Foster), tiny handcuffs, and the nightstick Lecter used to beat “Lt. Boyle” (played by another veteran actor Charles Napier) to death. The other figure created by Blitzway has Lecter clad in his straight jacket and face mask and comes with an actual moveable gurney. I usually don’t like to throw around the words “jaw-dropping,” but this is without question a more than accurate way to describe Blitzway’s terrifyingly life-like figures of Hannibal. Both are available for pre-order now and will run you a cool $269.99 apiece. The figures are set for release in March of 2018 and, as with other stunning figure releases by Blitzway, they will sell out. I’ve posted some chilling images of little Hannibal Lecter below. If you need me, I’ll be under the bed.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
The artist Eduardo Paolozzi once described the artist’s studio as a laboratory where experiments are carried out and chemicals react with each other to produce strange and unsteady alliances. A place where the artist’s personality spreads through the room’s collected detritus like some untreated fungal growth and creativity changes dramatically but generally for the better.

The same observation can be said for the teenager’s bedroom which is a similar site of experimentation and chemical reaction towards a creative sense of self. The teenage bedroom is where the revolution usually first starts between slammed doors and “You don’t understand me,” to music blaring at all hours of the day-and-night and the unrelenting desires of puberty.

These rooms tend to all end up looking the same with only the allegiances to content differing. The walls are usually decorated like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a collage of posters featuring the fashionable pop star, movie actor, and sexy pin-up. While the books and albums which spread across shelf and floor suggest a search for taste and substance. This little selection of photos culled from here and there give a rather personal peek at the typical teenager’s life (and taste in interior design) from the early 1960s to late 1980s.
 

 

 
More ‘imperial’ bedrooms, after the jump…
 

The fantastic cover of the 2006 book, ‘Knitting With Balls.’
 
I have to give it to the dynamic duo of Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner—a pair of public librarians in Michigan who run the fantastic site Awful Library Books. For about a decade Kelly and Hibner have been posting images of what they describe as “amusing and questionable” library books they have found, as well as submissions from their fans. To date, the site has posted 634 pages full of bizarre books covering topics on the dangers of ritual satanic abuse to the riveting sounding Wonders of Dust—a 79-page book published in 1980 about fucking DUST.

Before I knew it, I had dug through 100 pages on Awful Library Books before I forced myself to walk away from my desk because I couldn’t stop clicking to see what literary horrors were on the next page. Kelly and Hibner are pretty much the greatest people alive, and their prolific work has been featured in TIME, and on Jimmy Kimmel Live! I’ve posted a ton of images from Awful Library Books below, all of which defy logical explanation.
 

The cover of the 1977 book, ‘Looking Forward To Being Attacked.’
 

A page from inside of ‘Looking Forward To Being Attacked.’
 
More after the jump…

 
On April 25, 1967, CBS ran a special documentary that had been put together by David Oppenheim called Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution. The program was significant on a number of fronts. First, the hour-long program has been called in some quarters the first documentary about rock and roll ever made. There had certainly been ample treatment in feature films (mainly the Beatles) of the new forms of pop music that were budding in that decade as well as ample news coverage—whether Inside Pop merits this distinction I will leave for others to debate.

What is clearer is that the program represents almost certainly the first sustained effort to make a positive case for pop music to a mainstream audience on national TV. In other words, if the generational divide caused all cultural matters to be filtered through an “us” versus “them” filter, Inside Pop made no bones about debating the aesthetic and cultural merits of Herman’s Hermits, the Hollies, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, etc. from “their” perspective, from the perspective of those who had not instinctually embraced the new music.

Oppenheim’s resume up to that moment neatly illustrates the point, having made his reputation through working with figures such as Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Casals. Not long after making this program, Oppenheim was hired as Dean of NYU’s School of the Arts, which he has been credited with transforming into a first-rate cultural arts institution. (His son Jonathan Oppenheim edited the groundbreaking documentary Paris Is Burning.)

The program is divided into two halves. The first half is given almost entirely over to Leonard Bernstein, whose credibility as a cultural commentator to the mass audience at that moment can hardly be overstated. Bernstein had been music director of the New York Philharmonic for roughly a decade and had also composed the operetta Candide as well as West Side Story, and if you had asked ten moderately informed citizens in 1962 what American was best known for his work in classical music, probably all of them would have named Bernstein.

As stated, the first half of the program belongs to Bernstein—he is seated at a piano, playing snippets of songs by the Monkees, the Beatles, the Left Banke, and so on, and making observations about unexpected key changes as well as the skillful manipulation of Lydian and Mixolydian modes, whatever they might be. Bernstein goes out of his way to call 95% of pop music “trash” but nevertheless, his essential curiosity and openness to new forms would be impossible to miss. It would have been difficult indeed for such a presentation to be entirely devoid of fuddy-duddy-ism, but it’s truly an impressive performance—if only TV nowadays had similar semi-improv’d disquisitions on music by qualified commentators. Oh, and halfway through it all Bernstein brings in 15-year-old Janis Ian to sing “Society’s Child,” her hitherto blacklisted song about an interracial relationship, which incidentally soon became a hit after being heard on national television.
 

 
The second half of the program is a conventional narrated documentary focusing on the West Coast music scene with some British Invaders mixed in. Frank Zappa pops up and says a few sardonic things. Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits and Graham Nash of the Hollies get into an animated post-gig debate about the efficacy of pop music in bringing about societal change (Noone pessimistic, Nash optimistic). Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, still going by “Jim” at that point, materializes to tell every adult in America that “the drug revolution is just coming about and there are gonna be a lot of heads rolling from it,” which I’m sure went over like gangbusters.

The program gets a little boring around the 2/3 mark by focusing too long on Herman’s Hermits, who whatever else their virtues are don’t make a good case for groundbreaking trends in music, but hang on because Oppenheim saves the best for last, an extended in-studio rendition of “Surf’s Up” by Brian Wilson. Recorded on December 17, 1966, Wilson’s performance is made much more haunting because we have information the home audience did not, namely that Wilson was undergoing severe psychological stress at the time, that the Beach Boys nearly broke up over the Smile album (for which “Surf’s Up” was composed), and that more than three decades would pass until said album would reach the public in its final form.

Watch after the jump…

 
Arcade Attack: Silverball Heroes verses Video Invaders is a very strange short film. Part documentary, part animated sci-fi fantasy, this mini-movie also shines a light on technological obsolescence. Arcade Attack is entertaining, odd, and surprisingly thought-provoking, complete with a totally awesome synth score. It’s a little gem of a picture.

Arcade Attack is a UK production from 1982. It aired on HBO back in the day, acting as filler during the downtime between full-length movies. The short has a couple of connections to punk rock: It was produced and directed by Mike Wallington, who co-directed Dressing For Pleasure, a 1977 documentary on British folks with a rubber fetish (we told you about it), which greatly influenced punk fashion; the Arcade Attack animators, Phil Austin and Derek W. Hayes, worked on the animated sequences for the Sex Pistols movie, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. 

Arcade Attack is strange from the get-go, with an unsettling opening that features a laughing mechanical dummy amongst a collection of old-timey games in an empty arcade on a lonely pier. This is followed by the peculiarly animated (but also super-cool) sci-fi title sequence, before settling into a standard documentary format—or so it seems. A pinball vs. video games narrative develops, with whizzes on both sides showing off their skills and talking about why one form of gaming is better than the other, but something just feels a bit off. Two-thirds of the way through, it shifts gears again for an animated showdown that really needs to be seen to be believed. It’s better first-time viewers don’t know much more about Arcade Attack—and I’m not going to be the one that spoils it for you.

We’ll leave you with an impressed IMDb user:

I was totally flabbergasted and so was the friend who showed me the documentary, who was under the impression it was a timepiece documentary on arcade games. But it was so much more. It turned into an unbelievable trip. Go watch it…NOW.

 
And you can do just that, after the jump…

 
In 1948, the photographer Grete Stern was asked to contribute photographic illustrations for a weekly column on the interpretation of dreams in the Argentinian women’s magazine Idilio. The column entitled “El psicoanálisis le ayudará” (“Psychoanalysis will help you”) was written by Italian sociologist Gino Germani under the novel pseudonym of Richard Rest. Psychoanalysis was then considered the cure-all for everyone’s ills—though goodness knows what strange subconscious thought inspired Germani to choose the name “Dick” Rest….

Anyway…while Rest analyzed one of the many dreams submitted by the mainly working-class female readership, Stern produced a photomontage that recreated some aspect of the reader’s dream. These illustrations usually depicted women struggling to free themselves from the oppressive patriarchy of Argentinian society.

For example, in one image a woman is trying to communicate on a phone without a mouth. In another, a woman is trying to grow in the light which can be turned off on a whim by a giant man’s hand. Or there is the woman whose reflection in a mirror has shattered into fragments, or the woman housed in a birdcage like some exotic bird. And so on. During her tenure with Idilio, Stern produced around 150 photomontages between 1948 and 1951.

Grete Stern was born in Elberfeld, Germany, on May 9th, 1904. Her family were involved in the textile and fabric industry and made frequent visits on business to England, where Stern first attended school. Returning to Germany, Stern studied graphic design and typography at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Stuttgart between 1923-25. After college, she became a freelance graphic designer producing adverts for magazines and papers. However, it was after seeing an exhibition by the American photographer Edward Weston, that Stern decided on a career as a photographer.

Stern moved to Berlin where she became a photographic student under the tutelage of Walter Peterhans. Stern later said that Peterhans taught her that the camera was not just a mechanism for taking pictures but a whole new way of seeing. Peterhans went onto become the leading photographer with the Bauhaus movement. During her studies, Stern became close friends with another pupil Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach. Together they formed the advertising and portrait studio ringl+pit. The company name was concocted from the pair’s nicknames—Ringl for Grete and Pit for Ellen. Their work became highly successful—in particular their mixing of photographic images with text. During this time, Stern met and started a relationship with Argentinian photographer Horacio Coppola.

When Adolf Hitler and his band of Nazi thugs came to power, Stern left ringl+pit and moved with Coppola to England where she formed her own studio in 1934. Here she documented many of the German exiles like Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. In 1935, Stern and Coppola married. With the threat of war more apparent, Stern and Coppola moved to Buenos Aires, where they set up a graphic, advertizing, and photographic studio and held the first major exhibition of “modern photography” in the city.

Stern was way ahead of the curve. She was a pioneer for women working in a male-dominated and, let’s be honest, primarily sexist industry. Stern became a highly successful and inventive portrait photographer with her work exhibited and published across the world. However, the photomontages she produced for Idilio were long discounted as just hack work until their reassessment labeled them as what they are: powerful, imaginative, feminist artwork.

Stern died at the age of 95 in 1999.
 

 

 

 
More of Grete Stern’s dream work, after the jump…
 

 
Iggy Pop’s The Idiot LP wasn’t just his solo debut; the 1977 album marked his return after three years of laying low. Though credited solely to Pop, The Idiot was a collaboration between Iggy and his friend, David Bowie. Iggy has attributed his rebirth to Bowie, who he’s said “resurrected” him. He’s spoken many times over the years of his appreciation for Bowie’s faith in him, and for his kindness.

Here’s an anecdote from Iggy’s 1982 book, I need more: The Stooges and other stories, that took place during the recording of The Idiot:

One day we were in Chateau d’Herouville in France, outside Paris, taking a ping-pong break. Never in my life had I been able to play ping-pong. I never had the coordination—literally couldn’t play.

David said, “Come on, give me a game.”

“I can’t. I can’t play.”

But I tried it, and suddenly that I day I could play, and I’m playing and were about tied and I said, “You know, man, this is weird. Really weird. I always failed at this game and now I can play it.”

He said, “Well, Jim, it’s probably because you’re feeling better about yourself.” In the most gentlest way he said that, because usually, you know, nobody wants to be anybody’s teacher or leaner. You know what I mean? In the very gentlest way he said that. I just thought that was a nice answer. Three games later, I beat him and he never played me again. I got good REAL fast.

 

 
Bowie continued to support Iggy during The Idiot era, becoming a member of Pop’s band for the six-week jaunt promoting the album. The outing began on March 1 in Aylesbury for a run of dates in England, before coming to North America mid-month. The famed Dinah! appearance was on April 15, with the final show of the tour happening the following evening.
 

‘Mantra Studios Broadcast 1977.’ Chicago, March 28, 1977 (radio broadcast).

Bowie kept a low profile during this period, both on and off stage. Up until the Dinah! taping, he refused all interview requests, and during the shows he rarely looked at the audience, most of whom had no prior knowledge that he was part of Iggy’s group. Bowie played piano and keyboards, and the band also included guitarist Ricky Gardiner, as well as bassist Tony Sales, and drummer Hunt Sales. The Sales brothers also contributed backing vocals, as did Bowie.
 

‘Live In Concert – Cleveland 1977.’ Agora Ballroom, March 22, 1977.

The last date took place at the San Diego Civic Auditorium on April 16.

Continues after the jump…