Steve Ditko is the Thomas Pynchon of the comic book world. He’s a recluse, has rarely been photographed, interviewed or filmed. But his art is something even the most casual of pop culture observers are familiar with: he created, along with Stan Lee, Spider-Man and Dr. Strange and made significant contributions to the continuing sagas of The Hulk and Iron Man, among other comic book heroes.
I’m not a reader of comic books but I did get into Dr. Strange’s trippy alternate realities in the 1960s. With it’s surreal tales and psychedelic artwork, Dr. Strange was a superhero for hipsters. Ditko’s illustrations filled the panels with brightly-colored surreal images that popped off the page and the stories told ventured into the mystical and phantasmagorical. No question he influenced a slew of young artists to expand the realm of comic book content into what would later be known as “head” comics.
In 1965, a San Francisco gathering took place called “A Tribute to Dr Strange.” With music provided by The Jefferson Airplane and party favors by Owsley, this was one of the first hippie happenings. Ironic that Ditko should exert such a strong tug upon the consciousness of the counter-culture when he himself was a social Darwinist with a right-wing slant who probably loathed the touchy/feely, all-is-one, hippie outlook on life. Ditko’s dog eat dog philosophy (articulated in his Mr A comics) was the anti-thesis of the new age group grope.
Jonathan Ross was one of many young freaks who fell under the spell of Ditko’s pen and in this delightful documentary he sets out to find the illusive artist. First shown on BBC television in September 2007, In Search Of Steve Ditko, takes us on a journey into the life of a man who has done all he can to shift the attention away from the artist to the art. Ross seems so enamored of Ditko that he abandons his usual snarkiness and the film becomes a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts. You don’t have to be fan of comic books to enjoy the trip.
Patriot Depot, your one-stop online shop for crappy conservative “art” and tee-shirts that “humorously” explain to boys wanting to date your teenage daughter that you own a gun have a new item they seem quite proud of, “Fight” this ghastly portrait of ghostly conservo-martyr Andrew Breibart rendered as a glowing with ruddy health, heroic Nordic warrior god with too short arms…
In a previous life, your Editrix spent 12 years as an actual art critic, the kind who never didn’t have a shiv in her pencase and a sneer upon her face. But she always had room in her heart for art atrocities of the naif tradition — Slate pitches taking the form of art reviews, if you will — and this work by David Bugnon is the kind of masterpiece of Outsider art, a veritable holocaust-tsunami of bad taste, for which she would have #warred all those other stupid art critics who were too busy fawning over Richard Diebenkorn or some other AbEx total crap (and 50 years too late) to understand the beauty of a work like Fight. Look at the loving attention paid to the contours of Ghost Andrew Breitbart’s fat face! Look at the fanboy comic-geek detail on that super-bitchen sword and armor! Look at the improperly foreshortened arm, which would have left Ghost Andrew Breitbart with little 18-inch-long stub arms that couldn’t have even reached his pockets! Look at those steely dreamy sexboat eyes, undressing you out of your altarboy cassock! The only problem with Fight that we can possibly see is that David Bugnon got Hell’s lighting wrong.
LOL.
A “limited edition” of this sucker sells for just $3995.00…
A whimsical mélange of Kraftwerk’s “Robots” and 70s Soviet sci-fi film Teenagers in Space. According to Coilhouse, the movie is a children’s film “about evil robots.”
That’s pretty much all I need to know to make this a “must see” for me.
If you want to watch Teenagers in Space in its entirety, go here.
The whole PMRC music censorship flap of the 80s and 90s is a rare—BUT NO LESS DEFINITIVE—example of Democrats being just as bad, if not far worse, than Republicans can be.
The PMRC (“Parent Music Resource Group”) was headed by Al Gore’s then wife, Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, wife of Bush I’s then Treasury Secretary, James Baker, two bored Washington socialite busy-bodies who wanted to “make a difference” and get on tee-vee and stuff. Although the PRMC was nominally non-partisan, I blame the Democrats for supporting it more than I blame the Republicans (they didn’t call those Parental Advisory warnings “Tipper Stickers” for nuthin’).
The whole thing made it impossible for me to vote for Bill Clinton, with Gore as his running mate (both elections) and I didn’t vote for Gore in 2000, either. Clearly at one point in his public career, Al Gore backed censorship and thought crime as a winning political stance—he supported his wife’s efforts all the way—and frankly I didn’t need to know that much more about him. Gore might have rehabilitated himself somewhat with his environmental advocacy in recent years, but I still suspect that underneath he’s a total dickhead, nevertheless…
In 1990, The Oprah Winfrey Show hosted former Dead Kennedy Jello Biafra, Tipper Gore, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, future Fox News pundit, Juan Williams, Ice-T and Nelson George to discuss the PMRC issue.
For those of you too young to have lived through this, here a succinct bit of background from Biafra’s Wikipedia entry that will fill you in:
In April 1986, police officers raided his house in response to complaints by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). In June 1986, L.A. deputy city attorney Michael Guarino, working under City Attorney James Hahn, brought Biafra to trial in Los Angeles for distributing “harmful material to minors” in the Dead Kennedys album Frankenchrist. In actuality, the dispute was about neither the music nor the lyrics from the album, but rather the print of the H. R. Giger poster Landscape XX (Penis Landscape) [NSFW link] included with the album. Biafra believes the trial was politically motivated; it was often reported that the PMRC took Biafra to court as a cost-effective way of sending a message out to other musicians with content considered offensive in their music.
Music author Reebee Garofalo argued that Biafra and Alternative Tentacles may have been targeted because the label was a “small, self-managed and self-supported company that could ill afford a protracted legal battle.” Facing the possible sentence of a year in jail and a $2000 fine, Biafra, Dirk Dirksen, and Suzanne Stefanac founded the No More Censorship Defense Fund, a benefit made up of several punk rock bands, to help pay for his legal fees, which neither he nor his record label could afford. The jury deadlocked 5 to 7 in favor of acquittal, prompting a mistrial; despite a motion to re-try the case, the judge ordered all charges dropped.[citation needed] The Dead Kennedys disbanded during the trial, in December 1986, due to the mounting legal costs; in the wake of their disbandment, Biafra made a career of his spoken word performances. His early spoken word albums focused heavily on the trial (especially in High Priest of Harmful Matter), which made him renowned for his anti-censorship stance.
No one has posted Biafra’s amazing 45-minute long “Tales from the Trial” rant on YouTube, but I’m sure it’s pretty easy to track down.
Below, highlights of Jello Biafra absolutely eviscerating Tipper Gore’s pro-censorship arguments. This is an amazing piece of history, it really is:
I’ve seen some pretty spectacular close-up shots of the human eye before, but nothing compares to these digital images by photographer Suren Manvelyan, where the iris areas almost resemble alien landscapes. Totally cool.
Long before they covered The Beatles, Cannibal & the Headhunters, James Brown, Elvis, George Gershwin or Hank Williams, in 1971, the Residents rudely took on Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (rechristened “Holelottadick” and letting the intention of Robert Plant’s lyrics really hang out there) on their unreleased (but widely bootlegged) Baby Sex album.
Baby Sex was once broadcast in its entirety on Oregon radio station KBOO-FM during their “Residents Radio Festival” in 1977. The album’s second side is an astonishing studio collage piece titled “Hallowed Be Thy Wean” which includes a live recording of The Residents at San Francisco’s Boarding House in October 1971 with Snakefinger, the first time that “The Residents” moniker was employed by the group.
Baby Sex also features a rippingcover of Frank Zappa’s “King Kong,” that could almost be the Mothers of Invention playing. The Residents’ direct musical and sonic debt to Zappa (and Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict,” for that matter, “sampled” at length in “Hallowed…”) becomes much more obvious after you’ve given Baby Sex a listen. (Original Mother Don Preston would later collaborate with The Residents on their epic 1977 Eskimo album).
Elsewhere on the album, the cryptic ones “steal this riff” from Tim Buckley’s “Down By The Borderline” (from Buckley’s Starsailor album, which was released by Zappa’s Straight Records) and manage to sound like a geeky version on Santana.
Here’s the second incarnation of the Philip K. Dick (aka “Phil”) robot, built by Hanson Robotics.
The first iteration the PKD android doppelgänger pooped-out back in 2005. Apparently this newer “Phil” is “smarter and more sophisticated than ever, and is growing smarter all the time.”
In recent weeks Slow Nerve Action has uploaded a treasure trove of Flaming Lips concert footage to their YouTube channel. There are hours upon hours of Lips’ concert footage I’ve never seen before and I bet you haven’t either. Picking the “best of” is impossible, but this one shines for audio and visual quality: Flaming Lips on Austin City Limits, 2004.
Set list:
00:05:18 Race for the Prize
00:12:09 Fight Test
00:20:20 The Gash
00:26:00 Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1
00:34:00 Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 2
00:38:30 The Spark That Bled
00:45:49 Lightning Strikes the Postman
00:52:57 War Pigs (with Cat Power)
00:59:20 Somewhere Over the Rainbow (with Vernon Drozd)
01:04:25 In the Morning of the Magicians
01:14:46 She Don’t Use Jelly
01:22:45 Do You Realize?
As far as I can tell, this is the first time this show has appeared on YouTube.
Although the wild rumors of Scott Walker leaving behind his love-child from a college-age tryst seemed just a bit far-fetched (a sex scandal seems so unlikely for a guy with a face like Walker’s, don’t you think?) and truly “too good to be true,” the same can’t be said when an Emmy award-winning journalist who has worked for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, a former Attorney General and a former District Attorney all say that Walker IS the target of the so-called “John Doe” investigation… on a federal level.
It would kind of make sense, um, considering that THIRTEEN of Walker’s subordinates have been granted immunity and five people close to him have already been indicted.
With the recall election less than two days away, federal prosecutors are closing in on Governor Scott Walker, according to veteran political reporter David Shuster, former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, and former district attorney Bob Jambois.
In a conference call organized by state Democrats on Saturday evening, June 2, Shuster, Lautenschlager, and Jambois laid out evidence that Walker is a target of a federal investigation.
Wisconsin Democratic Party Communications Director Graeme Zielinski added that there is evidence of wrongdoing after Walker’s time as Milwaukee County Executive, and that the investigation includes criminal activity during his time as governor.
Based on conversations with a lawyer who has knowledge of the investigation, “We believe that Scott Walker set up a secret computer network in the governor’s office and Department of Administration offices, and that the John Doe investigation is seeking evidence of crimes he committed in Madison,” Zielinski said.
Walker denied the allegations. At a campaign event on Saturday, Walker answered “absolutely not” to reporters’ questions—raised by David Shuster’s reporting for Take Action News—about whether he had been informed, either formally or informally, that he might be a target of federal prosecution. “I’ve never heard a single thing about that, other than spin from the left,” Walker said. He described the allegations as “just more of the liberal scare tactics out there desperately trying to get the campaign off target.”
“I stand by my reporting 100 percent,” Shuster said in the conference call. “It’s clear to me that he is, in fact, a target in a federal investigation.”
Despite copious reporting, especially in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, about the Milwaukee County district attorney’s probe of alleged violations when Walker was county executive—including a secret email network maintained by his staff for the purpose of conducting illegal campaign activity on county time, the theft of funds intended for the widows and orphans of Iraq War veterans, and possible favorable treatment of campaign donors seeking public contracts, not much has been written about the FBI probe.
“The Wisconsin press has only reported about the John Doe—the state component,” said Zielinski. “They have not reported on the federal component of this.”
“I’ve been reporting on federal grand juries for twenty years”—including Justice Department probes of former Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, Monica Lewinsky, Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, and Jack Abramoff—said David Shuster, a former reporter for Fox News and anchor for MSNBC, who now works with Take Action News and as a host on Current TV.
In his reporting on FBI involvement in the current probe of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Shuster said he consulted with Justice Department attorneys in the public integrity section and “I got independent confirmation that he’s a target.”
Shuster said that he had learned Scott Walker’s attorneys had been seeking to have their client publicly cleared of wrongdoing for the last five or six weeks, in the run-up to the recall election. Prosecutors could not clear him, Shuster said, because Walker is a target.
The ongoing John Doe investigation by the Milwaukee County District Attorney has led to criminal charges against three of Walker’s former aides, an appointee, and a major donor. Thirteen of Walker’s associates have been granted immunity—including Walker’s spokesman, Cullen Werwie.
Recent campaign finance filings show that Walker has transferred a total of $160,000 into a criminal defense fund— the only criminal defense fund maintained by a governor of any state in the nation.
