‘The Delightful Mount.’
 
We are in Hell.

That’s how it begins.

We are in Hell and have to find our way out.

That’s the “tagline” for Dante’s epic allegorical poem the Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy tells of the poet Dante “midway upon the journey” of his life when suddenly he finds himself lost “within a forest dark” having strayed from his “straightforward path.” It’s like the opening of some grim horror story or even a disturbing pulp detective tale—where the hero awakes lost and menaced in a dark and foreboding place.

It was another great poet T. S. Eliot who once wrote “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no third.”

In terms of Europe, he was right—though some may now add Goethe.

Shakespeare with his poetry and plays changed the English language and offered an unrivaled insight into the human condition.

Dante certainly added to our language and literature and gave some insight into human understanding—but his greatest literary feat was creating our vision of Hell.

Hell with its gates and abandon all hope ye who enter here. Hell with its nine circles—its brutal, horrific punishments, fire and ice, mythical creatures and monstrous demons.

The Divine Comedy is an allegory about sin and redemption. Dante is led by yet another poet Virgil—chosen because he described Hell in his poem the Aeneid—through the Inferno (Hell) on towards Purgatory and Paradise.

Understandable therefore that Dante’s epic tale would appeal as a subject matter to an old superstitious Catholic like Salvador Dali. The fact that this poem had already been illustrated by William Blake and Gustave Dore only added to its attraction

In 1957, the Italian government approached Salvador Dali to produce a series of 101 watercolor illustrations intended to accompany a new edition of the Divine Comedy intended to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth in 1965. Dali set to work. But when the first of Dali’s paintings were exhibited at the Palazzo Pallavicini in Rome, a section of the Italian public were disgusted that a Spaniard had been hired to celebrate their country’s greatest poet rather than some Italian. The project was quickly dropped.

However, Dali seemed unperturbed. He finished the project.

In 1964, Dali approached his French publisher, Joseph Foret, who was then producing a volume of Dali’s illustrations to accompany a new edition of Don Quixote. Dali suggested the idea of publishing his illustrations in a new edition of Dante’s epic poem. Foret took a selection of Dali’s watercolors to the publishers Les Heures Claires—who were equally enthusiastic about the project.

Two engravers—Raymond Jacquet with his assistant, Mr. Taricco—were hired to hand carve the 3,500 wood blocks necessary to reproduce Dali’s watercolors. A limited edition of the book was published in Italian. Sets of Dali’s prints are still available to buy online for plenty of lucre.

Dali’s illustrations feature many of his trademark images—elongated limbs, melting faces, and disturbing unquiet. Though his paintings do not attempt to compete with the illustrations of Dore and Blake—Dali’s images do create a surreal interpretation of Hell and all its punishments. Below is the complete set of Dali’s illustrations for the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy—the Inferno—as recounts the poet’s journey from dark wood through the gates of the underworld onto the nine circles of Hell. The full poem can be read here.
 

‘Reassurance.’
 

I was among those, in Limbo, in suspense, and a lady called to me, she so beautiful, so blessed, that I begged her to command me.

 

‘Charon.’
 
More of Dali’s vision of Hell, after the jump…

 
It’s been widely noted that 2016 has been an especially rough year for legendary musicians. Sunday brought news of the passing of the great and prolific troubadour Leon Russell at the age of 74. Russell routinely put out gold albums in the 1970s and was a profound influence on singers as varied as Elvis Costello and Frank Black.

A bit surprisingly, Russell never had a top 10 album or song until The Union, his 2010 album wth Elton John. His early composition “A Song for You” was covered by countless musicians, most notably the Carpenters, but his highest-charting track was actually “Tight Rope,” which appeared on 1972’s Carney.

It’s amusing to notice the high-powered talent that he attracted for his first album, which came out in 1970. Credited are three Stones (Jagger, Wyman, Watts), two Beatles (Starr and Harrison), plus Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Joe Cocker, and Klaus Voormann.

The first single he ever released was “Roll Away the Stone,” and his label Shelter put together what can only be called a “music video” but everyone insists on calling a “promo.”

The animation was by Brian Zick, a graphic artist from southern California who is known for his striking pop art illustrations. You can see the influence of Yellow Submarine but it’s also a lot like the brilliant cut-out animations of Terry Gilliam for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which are more or less contemporaneous—I’d reckon Zick had never seen them. Zick did a bunch of album covers in the 1970s and 1980s.

More after the jump…

 
Objects that look like human faces are a fine way to kill a few minutes on the Internet. The phenomenon of seeing faces or other things in visual displays that are derived from chance is called pareidolia, and there’s a subreddit dedicated to it. The human ability to detect faces is strongly selected for in the Darwinian processes of evolution, as survival often depends on instinctual recognition and assessment of faces.

One of my favorite Peanuts strips ever involves Lucy, Linus, and Charlie Brown describing what they see in the clouds passing overhead, and hardly a week goes by without the news reporting that someone has spotted Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or Elvis in a bowl of porridge or a misshapen McNugget.
 

Chinsekikan head curator Yoshiko Hayama
 
Only recently, however, has it come to our attention that some remarkable person out there has taken the pareidolia thing and really run with it. A man named Shozo Hayama spent 50 years collecting rocks that resemble human faces, which are called jinmenseki in Japanese, and he founded a museum in Tokyo called Chinsekikan, which means “the hall of curious rocks.” Shozo died in 2010 but his widow Yoshiko Hayama has kept the museum open and serves as its head curator. It’s unclear how many rocks the museum has, but it’s upwards of 1,700.

Oddly, I am writing this post from the city that boasts the most famous rock museum in the world—the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
 

 

 
More rocks after the jump…

The picture sleeve of Netherlands-based all-girl band Wicked Lady’s ‘Girls Love Girls,’ 1979. The girls appear to be channeling the cover of the 1977 album by Thor, ‘Keep the Dogs Away.’ Right on ladies!
 
This post was inspired by blogger Eric Brightwell and his three-part series of articles that featured a shitload of fantastic sounding all-girl bands and an entire piece dedicated to groups from the 1970s. It was Brightwell’s third in a series that uncovered all-lady bands that dated back as far as 1910. I don’t know what we did to ever deserve Mr. Brightwell and his somewhat exhaustive chick-centric exposés but I for one have been obsessing about his findings for nearly a week now.

Since I adore all things that are from the decade that helped define the correct temparture of cool: aka the 1970s, I zeroed in on a few of my favorites like Dutch band Wicked Lady (pictured at the top of this post), St. Louis’ The Welders, and Portland, Oregon’s empowering punk pioneers, Neo Boys. In most cases the bands featured in this post didn’t stick around too long, maybe two or three years before disappearing, which for me only enhances the joy of discovering sounds made by girls who had the courage and chops to put themselves out there. I’ve included some cool photos followed by some of my favorite tracks done by each band that I was able to dig up online. Face the facts people, girls rule.
 

Hounslow, UK-based all-girl band, Mother Trucker and the amazing cover of their self-titled 1975 album.
 

St. Louis-based band The Welders.
 

Toronto band Curse.
 
More girls after the jump…

‘A Desk’ by Tetsuya Ishida, 1996.
 
Though Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida left this world at the over a decade ago—a mere month before his 32st birthday—he left us with a large collection of his surreal paintings to ponder that some speculate support the claim that Ishida’s death was a suicide and not an unfortunate accident.

On May 23rd 2005 Ishida was killed after being run over by a train. The vast majority of Ishida’s paintings reflect the harsh reality of life in Japan that Ishida experienced while growing up—the relentless pressure to reach impossibly high academics standards, the lack of jobs and the fact that Japan during his lifetime held the dubious title of having the highest suicide rates in the world (though Japanese suicide rates have declined in recent years). While Ishida’s story perhaps ended like many of his peers his legacy does provide keen insight into his perception of what life is like in Japan through the eyes of someone who lived through it for a short time. Themes such as isolation and the loss of hope for what the future holds. Often Ishida will incorporate his dead-eyed human subjects into a mechanical apparatus or other tangible everyday objects in an effort to convey the brutal erosion of quality of life in the capitalist system.

Ishida’s work possess the ability to silently and effortlessly express what so many lie sleeplessly thinking about. His paintings are accomplished and hauntingly mesmerizing, reinforcing their importance to be seen. Ishida’s work is the subject of at least two books Tetsuya Ishida Complete and Tetsuya Ishida Posthumous Best Practices. A number of the paintings below are probably NSFW.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
The most elementary fact of our existence—time passes, implacably and forever—is always the one that surprises us the most. You probably see the note hit several times a week in your social media: “Return to Cookie Mountain came out ten years ago??” “Third Rock from the Sun is twenty years old!! No way!” Well, yes way. Time passes.

Some photographs can have the same effect, but few more forcefully than the series of before/after pictures that have recently been unveiled of British people caught in their everyday lives decades ago—and then recreated much more recently. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, in eastern England had a gregarious paramedic who liked to amuse himself by taking pictures of local citizens. HIs name is Chris Porsz, and some took to calling him the “paramedic paparazzo.”

One of the striking things about Porsz’s unfussy and unpretentious pictures is the sheer lack of judgment. Porsz had a knack for capturing people of all types—young lovers, cheerful punks, children at play, women contemplating a makeover, and working people making their way through the day.

Over the last seven years Porsz has dedicated countless hours tracking down his original subjects and persuading them to pose for pictures—in fact, the same pictures that were taken so long ago. The result is almost unbelievably evocative and poignant, a little bit reminiscent of Michael Apted’s landmark Up series of documentaries, which tracked a group of twenty British schoolchildren every seven years until deep into middle age.

Porsz has a new book coming out called Reunions that contains the entire series of before/after photos. As the photographer says, “This book has been nearly forty years in the making, and I believe the project is totally unique. I don’t think anyone else has tracked down so many strangers and recreated photos in this way before.”

Several years ago Porsz came out with a related book called New England: The Culture and People of an English New Town During the 1970s and 1980s.

Porsz became interested in photography shortly after his first child was born in 1978. He was working as a “casualty porter” at Peterborough District Hospital at the time, and took to the streets for inspiration.

“It has been very hard work and I’ve had lots of setbacks along the way, but I always believed this could be something really special and was determined to do at least 100 reunion pictures and it has been a labour of love.” The final product, Reunions, actually has 134 re-created pics in it, so he surpassed his original goal by a considerable margin.
 

 

 
Many more before/after pics after the jump…...
 

 
The fulcrum of John Waters’ career is Hairspray, the PG-rated 1988 crossover hit that made it possible to discuss his movies in, erm, “polite society.” Before Hairspray he was a scourge, after it he became America’s favorite dirty uncle.

This news report of the filming of Cry-Baby, Waters’ 1990 follow-up to Hairspray, is unimaginable without the success of its predecessor. Shooting for Cry-Baby took place in the spring and summer of 1989 in and around (where else?) Baltimore. The photo above was likely taken during the shoot, as Johnny Depp turned 26 in June of 1989.

The voiceover blandly calls Waters “a poor man’s Barry Levinson gone berserk,” which seems highly questionable to me. Aside from their hometowns, Levinson and Waters have little in common.

The segment features a couple of great quotes from Waters:
 

“It’s the same kind of movie. It’s a John Waters film. There’s puke in it, you’ll be happy to know.”

“Some older woman came up to me in the supermarket and said, ‘I love all your films!’ I said, ‘You do not!’”

 
Priceless stuff.

According to Wikipedia Cry-Baby was the only movie of Waters’ career that went through a bidding war, based on the success of Hairspray. But then Cry-Baby didn’t make its $12 million budget back, and that was the end of the bidding wars for John Waters.

I’d bet anything that the Cry-Baby set was a fun place to hang around. You had Waters and Depp, of course, but also Ricki Lake, Iggy Pop, Traci Lords, Patricia Hearst, Susan Tyrrell, and Willem Dafoe, and that’s not even getting into Waters’ usual supporting players. After the video we’ve supplied some groovy pics taken while the shooting of the movie was in progress.
 

 

 

 
Much more after the jump….....
 

An early shot of The Cure (L to R: Lol Tolhurst, Michael Dempsey and Robert Smith) hanging on the railroad tracks. This photo was likely taken around 1976/1977.
 
I spent a fair amount of time recently pouring through nostalgic images and musical performances by The Cure while pulling my post about the band’s first show in Boston in 1980. The Internet will often reward you with great things. Such is the case with these magical photos of Robert Smith and his bandmates, some taken as early as 1976.

If my math is correct (numbers and Cherrybomb don’t go well together) Robert Smith and drummer Lol Tolhurst were just seventeen. Bassist Michael Dempsey probably bought booze for them as he was eighteen in 1976. After you let it sink in that members of The Cure were once teenagers just like all of us, I’ll ask you to come to the realization that unlike most of us they were already on a pretty clear trajectory for greatness.

When they weren’t in school together they were already busy writing songs and by 1977 were playing gigs to a fast-growing fan base. All this noise got the teenage Smith, Dempsey and Tolhurst signed to Fiction Records (run by Chris Parry who was also an early champion of The Jam and Siouxsie and the Banshees). By the time 1979 rolled around The Cure were ready to release their stellar first album Three Imaginary Boys and a couple of follow-up singles you may have heard before “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Jumping Someone Else’s Train.” So strap in and get ready for a trip to a time before Robert Smith’s signature electrified goth hair and lipstick was a thing and see The Cure looking more like the images from your old high school yearbook.
 

Michael Dempsey, Marc Ceccagno, Robert Smith, Allan Hill, and Lol Tolhurst taken sometime between 1976 and 1978.
 

Three Imaginary Boys, likely circa 1976/77.
 
More Cure after the jump…

 
From what I can gather Le Livre de la Sante or The Book of Health or the Encyclopedia of Mind, Body and Health by Joseph Handler was a multi-volume series of text books on science, anatomy, biology, psychology and health intended for use in the classroom. Reading these text books must have been a blast as page after page is filled with the most beautiful day-glo colored illustrations by an incredibly diverse range of artists and graphic designers.

Published in Monte Carlo between 1967 and 1969, Le Livre de la Sante was also made available in an Iranian edition—which kinda shows how hip Iran was back then. Handler’s educational books are still available to buy—and 50 Watts has uploaded a whole library of pages from these books which can be viewed here.
 

‘L’homme tableau de Pinoncelli’ by Josue.
 

‘Le repartition des cancers’ (the distribution of cancers) by Osterwalder.
 
More exquisite illustrations from ‘Le Livre de la Sante,’ after the jump….
 

The Plasmatics at The Rathskeller in Boston. Photo generously provided by Mike Mayhan.

You Can Dress Up In Disguises
You Can Try To Mesmerize ‘em
You Can Surround
Yourself With Friends
Who Tell You What You Want To Hear
But In The End No Matter What You Do
You Will Come Shining Through

 
A few lyrics from the Plasmatics 1981 song “A Pig is a Pig”
 
I wasn’t old enough to truly appreciate Plasmatics vocalist and heavy metal crusader Wendy O. Williams during her punk-era heyday. But by the time I figured out who I wanted to be sometime in the late 80s I was fully in awe of her.

Williams was an inspiration for me back when I had become brave enough to put myself out into the world—writing about music, weirdness and other lowbrow pursuits. She was confident, strong and never ever took a backseat to anyone. Not the press who hounded her, people who flat out didn’t understand her and chose to label her as “obscene,” or the cops who sent her to the hospital when she defied them. Last week was a challenge to me as a human. I know I wasn’t the only one who laid in bed a lot because the contemplation of what our future looks like was too much for me to handle while standing up. I’m now past my “mourning” period and have moved on to being very fucking angry.

Basically, I hate conformity. I hate people telling me what to do. It makes me want to smash things. So-called normal behaviour patterns make me so bored, I could throw up!—W.O.W.

As a woman, forward thinker—and a mother—I want you to listen to Wendy share her feelings spoken some 35 years ago about sexism and female objectification—two negative attitudes that have become even more magnified (as well as seemingly completely acceptable to half of the residents of the U.S.) of late. They echo the spirit of lyrics of the Plasmatics powerful (and timely) song, “Pig is a Pig” (from the band’s second release Beyond the Valley of 1984) which Williams’ references during the short interview with Jeanne Beker on the Toronto-based The Music Show back in 1981. While trying to sort through all the madness that has been the past week, like many of you I relied on music to get me through as nothing else made any fucking sense. When I came across the footage of Wendy O’s interview I felt a distinct wave of reassurance thanks to her powerful words and point-blank fuck-this-bullshit attitude which are very much reflective of the many emotions I’ve been rollercoastering through myself.

More after the jump…