Is is me, or is there something a wee bit sinister looking about these DIY children’s masks from the 1968 book Paper Faces by Michael Grater? These images will probably give me nightmares.
More photos after the jump…
I usually don’t like skulls or wallpaper in general, but this Day of the Dead Skull design by Emily Evans of AnatomyUK is incredible! The wallpaper was specially designed for two Latin-themed bars located in London.
According to Street Anatomy blog:
“The high quality wallpaper is meticulously screen printed by hand using metallic gold ink on peacock, charcoal, and raspberry. The gold ink makes the pattern shine brilliantly under a variety of lighting.”
For more information about Evans’ wallpaper visit Anatomy Boutique.
A guest post from our esteemed, super-smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, publisher of the Of Twos Minds blog and author of the new book, Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change
Aldous Huxley imagined a world in which the Status Quo satisfies its lust for power by “suggesting people into loving their servitude.”
Yesterday I discussed the Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka as a means of understanding the global crisis. It’s not just financial fraud on a vast scale, or debt or leverage or derivatives or a hundred other arcane mechanisms of parasitic predation; it’s the partnership of a mindlessly expansive Central State with Monopoly Capital and the media machine that serves them.
I considered including Aldous Huxley in the convergence, as he too anticipated the essential nature of modern life. But perhaps his insights are more complementary than convergent, for he understood the media and State’s capacity to not only present a deranged and destructive Status Quo as “normal” but to persuade the serfs to embrace it.
Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to “love their servitude” via propaganda, drugs, entertainment and information-overload. In his view, the energy required to force compliance exceeded the “cost” of persuasion, and thus the Powers That Be would opt for the power of suggestion.
He outlined this in a letter to George Orwell:
“My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
As prescient as he was, Huxley could not have foreseen the power of electronic media hypnosis/addiction as a conditioning mechanism for passivity and self-absorption. We are only beginning to understand the immense addictive/conditioning powers of 24/7 social and “news” media. What would we say about a drug that caused people to forego sex to check their Facebook page? What would we say about a drug that caused young men to stay glued to a computer for 40+ hours straight, an obsession so acute that some actually die? We would declare that drug to be far too powerful and dangerous to be widely available, yet the Web is now ubiquitous.
Servitude comes in many gradations and forms. Relying on the Federal Reserve to constantly prop up our pension and mutual funds lest reality cause them to collapse is a form of servitude; we end up worshipping the Fed’s every word and act as mendicants worship their financial saviors.
That the Fed is unelected and impervious to democracy or the will of the people is forgotten; all that matters is that we love our servitude to it.
I have discussed the atomizing nature of social media and the way it conditions self-absorption in 800 Million Channels of Me (February 21, 2011), and the way that the consumerist ethos generates insecurity, alienation and social defeat. The only “cure” for social defeat is to love the servitude of consumption, convenience and the resulting debt-serfdom: The Last Refuge of Wall Street: Marketing To Increasingly Insolvent Consumers (December 12, 2011).
I have covered these topics in depth in my books Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change and Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation.
The Central State has the power via welfare (individual and corporate) and bailouts to buy complicity. Since the human mind rebels against hypocrisy and insincerity—we can all spot a phony—we subconsciously persuade ourselves of the rightness and inevitability of servitude and self-absorption.
And that is how we come to love our servitude; we persuade ourselves to believe it’s acceptable and normal rather than deranged and destructive.
This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith, publisher of the Of Twos Minds blog and author of the new book, Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change
One of Boy George’s best pieces of music—well, in my book, anyway—is 1988’s seldom-heard slice of fierce, dance music protest, “No Clause 28.” I picked it up, neither knowing what it was about, nor having actually heard it, because of the amazing cover artwork by Jamie Reid depicting Boy George as Enid Blyton’s “Noddy.” It’s a pretty amazing record of its time, in more ways than one.
Clause 28 or Section 28, as it was also known, was an addition to the Local Government Act of 1988. Clause 28 stipulated that local government councils in the UK “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”
This was the end of the Thatcher era and due to newly widespread awareness—and fear—of AIDS, then considered a gay disease, homosexuality was frowned upon in such a way that it was thought necessary to officially condemn it and protect children from it. The matter was largely a symbolic issue, but it caused many gay and lesbian groups at high schools and universities to close shop.
The night before Section 28 became law (May 24, 1988) a lesbian chained herself to the desk of BBC Six O’Clock News presenter Sue Lawley. Parliament was also invaded by lesbian activists scaling the building like rock climbers.
In many ways, Clause 28 is what saw the cohesion of Britain’s modern gay rights movement. Aside from Boy George, many big name celebrities spoke out about Clause 28, such as Ian McKellen, beloved One Foot in the Grave actress Annette Crosbie, Helen Mirren, Jane Horrocks and comics great, Alan Moore.
The Section was repealed on June 21, 2000 in Scotland, and in the rest of Great Britain in November of 2003. It’s worth noting that Prime Minister David Cameron was vocally in support of keeping the Section intact, although he thought better of this later and apologized in 2010.
I probably owe Terry Gilliam money. I nicked his book Animations of Mortality when I was a kid as I wanted to improve my skills at drawing cartoons. Gilliam’s work was a big influence, (along with Ronald Searle and Ralph Steadman), and I spent hours perusing the pages of my pilfered goods, learning how to create art from a Master
What joy, therefore, to find Mr Gilliam’s daughter Holly has started a blog uncovering her father’s brilliant work, uploading discoveries on an almost daily basis.
Since October last year, Holly has undertaken this mammoth task of organizing her father’s archive:
....all his work from pre-Python days, as a cartoonist, photojournalist & assistnat editor for Help! magazine, through all his original artwork and cut-outs for Python animation, posters, logos and generally everything Python, to his storyboards, designs and sketches for his feature films and other non-film related projects (including his opera of “Faust” and that infamous Nike commercial). Why!? Because I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by my father’s amazing work all my life and I think it should be seen by everyone so I am organising the archive so it can eventually be put in a book and an exhibition.
Holly is to be commended for this fabulous undertaking and I’m more than delighted she is sharing her father’s spectacular art works, and am now certainly willing to cough up the five quid owing on the book.
See more of this on-going project at Discovering Dad aka delving into Terry Gilliam’s personal archive. Or, follow Holly on twitter for updates. All images copyright Terry Gilliam.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Terry Gilliam: How he made stop-frame animations in his bedroom
Bonus Gilliam’s Monty Python illustration, after the jump…
Via Laughing Squid
I’d like to wish Mick Jagger a happy 69th birthday by sharing one of the most electrifying rock ‘n’ roll moments in cinema: the “Memo From Turner” scene in Donald Cammell’s mindbending masterpiece Performance.
Putlizer-prize winning cartoonist, Mark Fiore goes after the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in “ALEC Rock.”
This is how a bill becomes a law when the corporate class warriors of ALEC get behind it.
Produced by Mark Fiore, The ALEC Exposed Project and Alliance for a Better Utah.
Via Glen E. Friedman
Hilum is a strikingly beautiful and quite spooky fantasy created by marionette designer and manipulator Patrick Sims of Les Antliaclastes puppet theater.
The manipulators dressed and masked in white lace become a part of the surreal world of Hilum as they interact with the puppets in an opium-like dream. In medical terminology hilum is the point where blood vessels and nerves enter and begin to vein their way through an organ, not unlike an umbilical cord or a puppet’s strings, carrying energy and primal instruction - magic embodied.
Hilum takes place in the basement laundry room of a second-rate Natural History Museum. The cellarage is populated by a host of dubiously adorable urchins who have, for some reason or other, been cut off from the rest of the kingdom of curiosities that has remained ordered upstairs. Orphaned and liberated from their hosts, the prenatal rascals amuse themselves as most children would do at this age. Washer-women attend to their opus of bleaching laundry, despite the frequent shenanigans of the children.What starts off as mere women’s work and child’s play eventually becomes impossible. In the cubic crucible- whites mix with colours, wools are washed with warm water, the cat is chucked into the heavy duty rinse… and playtime quickly becomes a downright theatre of cruelty.
Video directed and filmed by Sébastien Jousse, Franck Littot and Benoit Millot.
Dangerous Minds pal—and man about town in Los Angeles, New York and Paris—Michael Kurcfeld has just posted a new interview with Robert Crumb on the occasion of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris retrospective of his work. The show is on view until August 19.
You get to catch a peek of “Chichi Biguine,” the delightful Max Fleischer-esque interactive piece Crumb made in collaboration with Frederic Durieu, starring his “Mr. Natural” and “Angelfood McSpade” characters. Interestingly, Crumb also addresses criticism that “Angelfood McSpade” is a racist stereotype.
Vice’s Brayden Olson went to the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden and dropped acid for the first time. Here’s a record of what happened.
Video after the jump…