Artist Jimmy Cauty achieved international fame as “Rockman Rock” one half of The KLF (along with Bill Drummond aka “King Boy D”) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The KLF released a series of highly successful and influential records including “Last Train to Trancentral,” “What Time Is Love?” and “3 a.m. Eternal.” Under the name The Timelords the duo had a number one hit with “Doctorin’ the Tardis” their playful mash-up of the Doctor Who theme, Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll (Part Two)” and “Block Buster!” by Sweet. They had a further number one (in eighteen countries no less) with “Justified and Ancient (Stand by The JAMs),” their collaboration with country and western singer Tammy Wynette in 1991.

The following year The KLF appeared with grindcore band Extreme Noise Terror at the Brit Awards when they fired blanks from a machine gun over the audience’s heads. At the end of the ceremony the duo dumped a dead sheep outside the venue, then announced the end of The KLF and deleted their entire back catalog.

But this was only a taster of what was to follow.

In August 1994 Cauty and Drummond (now under the moniker The K Foundation) burned a million pounds in cash on the Scottish island of Jura. What the fuck that was about—well, no one is really quite sure—but it has become a moment that has defined the careers of both men since.
 

A kilted Jimmy Cauty fires blanks at the Brit Awards audience 1992, and an image from the K Foundation’s burning of one million pounds.
 
From 2000 Jimmy Cauty has been making political and provocative artwork—ranging from a limited edition series of stamps Black Smoke, Stamps of Mass Destruction (2003) which was eventually withdrawn after the Royal mail threatened legal action, to opening a “gift shop” at the Aquarium Gallery in 2004 selling “terror ware” based on the British government’s anti-terror leaflet Preparing for Emergencies.

In 2011, Cauty started producing a series called A Riot in a Jam Jar featuring miniature dioramas depicting violent confrontations between the police and the public. These jam jars contained imagined scenes including the execution of the then Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, and the execution of bankers and the execution of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall.
 

Cauty’s imagining of Prince Charles and Camilla about to be bludgeoned after their car was attacked during a student riot in 2010.
 
Now a limited edition of one of Cauty’s jam jars has been put up for sale on eBay. The work entitled Please Don’t Hit Me features a policeman interrogating a young boy. In a limited edition of ten—each individually numbered—Cauty’s Please Don’t Hit Me will set you back £465 (around $600). Place your order here.
 

 
More of Jimmy Cauty’s provocative jam jar art, after the jump…

 
I’m loving this Public Enemy action figure set designed by Ed Piskor, author of the New York Times best- selling and Eisner Award-winning comic series: Hip Hop Family Tree. I dig the details and it looks like they’re posable in the knees, elbows, hips and shoulders.

Kings of Hip Hop and inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Public Enemy’s “first action figure as a set” featuring four of the central members from the 80’s. Members are: Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Professor Griff, and Terminator X.

Right now they’re only on pre-order at $60 for all four of ‘em. The release date is set for August 2016.

 
More after the jump…

 
The competition for the world’s biggest Kraftwerk fan just went up a notch—maybe three notches. A man in Florida posted a Flickr set depicting his own everyday life as a robotic humanoid wearing the red and black uniform that the German quartet donned for the band’s iconic 1978 album The Man-Machine.

The gentleman in the pictures appears to have changed his name to “Kraftwerk” (although the picture of his driver’s license with his new name looks suspiciously ‘Shopped to me). In the pictures he is depicted going record shopping (clutching an LP of his beloved Man-Machine, of course), as well as consuming a chicken salad croissant and a cold brew coffee and even sleeping in his bed (yes, wearing the ridiculous red shirt and black tie under the duvet).

Amazingly, he neither depicts himself using a pocket calculator, nor riding a bicycle. There are also zero traffic cones in the pictures. However, there is an automotive theme to the gallery—he is shown in the driver’s seat of his “truck” and also putting “petrol” (not gas?) in his tank as well as paying for it with a “debit card.” Surely all of that qualifies as some kind of reference to Autobahn?
 

 

 
More pics after the jump….....

Black Magic magazine, Volume three, Number two.
 
The rise of interest in New Age and occult practices in the 60s and 70s (with a heavy nod of thanks to satanic merchant Kenneth Anger for picking up where Aleister Crowley left off) helped pave the way for a new crop of niche “men’s interest” magazines that focused on hot girls getting down with the devil as well as witches and other kinds of sexy pagan-flavored pursuits. Nice.
 

Bitchcraft magazine, Volume three, Number one.
 
Inside the covers of such magazines as the wickedly titled BDSM-themed magazine Bitchcraft (which was actually pretty nuts by all accounts) you might find erotic fictional depictions of satanic rituals (such the faux fiends on the cover of Bitchcraft) and others, such as Satan magazine were more like devilish Playboy doppelgangers purporting to be flirting with the dark side when in fact it was just another way to sell pictures of pretty girls and perhaps celebrities (such as gorgeous fireball, actress Tina Louise who played Ginger on Gilligan’s Island who appeared the publication in 1957) in various stages of undress with devil horns on their heads. During the course of researching this very sexy post, I came across this composed yet completely depraved letter that was written by a reader of girl-loving magazine Nymphet back in the March 1976 issue in response to an illustrated image of Anton LaVey and a nude woman. Although it’s a fairly terrifying read it does help support the fact that there was indeed a market for publications to help satiate the sexually deprived Satan worshipers of the world:

I’ve been a fan of skin mags for a long time, now and one of the things that bugs me in particular, is the absence of the occult from sexually oriented material. For a brief spurt about three or four years ago, voodoo, Satanism and the occult were getting a fair amount of play in magazines similar to your own. Now, however, there’s little––if anything, appearing on this shadier side of human sexuality. I find extremely arousing, the rituals and ceremonies involving the symbols of witchcraft and devil worship––especially the idea of sacrificing a virgin and the actual deflowering of the virgin by the Evil One himself. One of the most exciting aspects of that brief period was the popularity of Anton La Vea [sic], occult leader of the 5000-member Satanic Church in San Francisco, California. I thought he was very colorful and the sensual practice of nudity among his worshippers, stimulating indeed! Other than this, I really have no complaints about your magazine. But I would like to see more kinky types of sex handled visually, as well as in the articles––subjects like necrophilia and bestiality.”
J. L. Jackson, Atlanta, Georgia.

Well said, J.L. Jackson of Atlanta—you sir or madam clearly know how to party. Images from the covers and pages of magazines such as Pagan, Satan’s Scrapbook, Black Magic and of course Satan (because, Satan) follow. Some are NSFW.
 

The cover of a vintage Satan magazine.
 

Actress Tina Louise in the February, 1957 issue of Satan magazine.
 

 
Russel Cameron creates surreal life-like sculptures of flesh and bone appendages.

Cameron’s sculptures of deformed limbs and freakish body parts look like they belong in a David Cronenberg movie or are perhaps some remnant meat blown off by an IED, or animal parts, trussed and ready for cooking. His artworks are almost obscene. They are disturbing, grotesque but at the same time compelling and strangely beautiful.

Cameron is a self-taught sculptor based in New York. According to a mission statement at the Macabre Gallery Russel’s main objective when creating a sculpture:

...is to give it life, feeling and a place among us, whether it be a classic bust or a deformed limb mounted on a sheet of wood the piece should speak and tell a story to the viewer.

A majority of Russel’s sculptures possess human characteristics such as skin texture and some form of anatomical structure, these traits all play an essential role in the creation of each piece.

Some artistic influences include Zdzislaw Beksinski, H.R. Giger, Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch.

Russel believes everything on earth has it’s place and those who see beauty in what the masses find grotesque or disturbing have a gift worth exploring.

Cameron has work exhibited by the beinArt Gallery in New York and his work is for sale. You can also follow him on Instagram and Facebook.
 

 

 

 

 
Long live the new flesh, after the jump….
 

 
This is a welcome development: Hypnopazūzu, a duo comprising Current 93’s David Tibet and Killing Joke bassist Youth, will be releasing an album and playing a show in London this year. (Youth’s other duo is the Fireman, with Paul McCartney of Wings fame.) The date of the show has not been announced, but the record, Create Christ, Sailor Boy, is coming out on the House of Mythology label in August; it will be a three-sided LP (with side four devoted to “a laser etching of a Youth/David Tibet Hallucinatory Cartoon”) and a single CD.

It figures these guys are old pals. Youth, along with Annie Anxiety and Steven Stapleton of Nurse with Wound, joined Tibet on Current 93’s first album, 1984’s Nature Unveiled. As for Pazuzu, whose name I will forever hear as intoned by Richard Burton in Exorcist II, he is among the evil deities William S. Burroughs invokes at the beginning of Cities of the Red Night:

Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities…

 

 
Pazuzu is also the subject of a number of Tibet’s recent paintings. Tibet explained (sort of) his interest in the Mesopotamian demon king in a very condensed memoir published by Dazed three years ago:

I started painting Hallucinatory Prayers, which consisted of biblical verses written thousands of times in white ink on black paper. Revisiting my pubescence, I did an MA in Coptic and started translating mainly Sahidic texts. Then I began to learn Akkadian after dreaming of metal doors covered with cuneiform, which meant I had also to paint Pazuzu. Anaku pazuzu, as the Akkadians wrote.

While you search for your copy of Huehnergard’s Akkadian grammar, hallucinate with “Magog At The MayPole,” from Create Christ, Sailor Boy.
 

Oliver Reed as Dr. Hal Raglan in The Brood (1979)
 
David Cronenberg really directed some doozies between about 1975 and 1990…. actually he never stopped making remarkable movies, but that first big chunk of material represents most of what we think about when we throw out the word “Cronenbergian.” The prosaic yet unsettling visions he presented in Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, and Dead Ringers are the most thorough expression of the “body horror” genre and have no true equal in the canon of world cinema.

Until I watched L. C. Durham’s intriguing, er, dissection of Cronenberg’s repeated inclusion of unreliable medicos in this period, it had never occurred to me that the pattern was that strong. Get a load of this murderer’s row of medical professionals: Dr. Antoine Rouge, Dr. Emil Hobbes, Dr. Dan Keloid, Dr. Hal Raglan, Dr. Paul Ruth, Dr. Sam Weizak, Drs. Beverly and Elliot Mantle. It’s a lovely bunch, no? We can only wonder why Cronenberg had quite so much to say about doctors.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
A company called Altar Furniture has a spiffy line of coffee tables that resemble audio cassettes from the 1960s through the 1990s. As you can see above, conversion kits are available if you would prefer to use the same basic cassette component for a dining table or a desk.

The cassette tables are available to buy, but they aren’t cheap. All the models go for the same price of 1,925 Euros (about $2,120).

One of the designs pays homage to “the first compact music cassette ever manufactured,” a Philips product released in 1964. Many of the available models emulate actual demo cassettes used in the early days of bands like Metallica, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. Other touchstones include Día de Muertos, Cypress Hill, the Dead Kennedys, and the Sugar Hill Gang.

The best thing, though? Let’s go to the Altar website:
 

Each table contains 120 meters of satin, to give you a real tape feeling, and yes, the wheels turn in the table. Make sure not to unwind all of it, it is a nightmare to put back.

 
Now that’s the picture I want to see, how one of these tables looks after your bratty 7-year-old nephew gets through with it…....
 

“1964”
 

“Blue”
 
More after the jump…

 
While science fiction is a rich genre for both film and literature, the visual art it inspires—most frequently relegated to the covers of bad paperbacks—is very often astoundingly corny, regardless of how good the book it’s interpreting might actually be. Really good sci-fi art is really hard to come by, another reason why Simon Stålenhag is so singular; his post-invasion landscapes are dreamy, intense, and mysterious—completely devoid of the heavy-handed cheese one normally associates with paintings of robots and/or aliens taking over the earth.

Stålenhag has complied his work into two high-concept art books, Tales from the Loop and the sequel Things from the Flood, which comes out in November but is available for pre-order now. Ground Zero for Stålenhag’s dystopia is an alternative Sweden from his own ’80s and ’90s childhood, where experiments with a massive particle accelerator—“The Loop”—go terribly wrong. Despite the disaster, Stålenhag likes to focus on the quiet and the mundane countryside, now irrevocably altered by mysterious invaders. Still, there is an intimacy to his work, with special attention to the domestic lives, childhoods and romances of the people living in this chaotic new world.
 

 

 
Much more of Simon Stålenhag’s work after the jump…

 
Episode #57 of The Monkees saw two of the most “out there” moments of the entire series flanking one of their less memorable escapades—Peter has his mind taken over by an evil hypnotist he visits to get over his writer’s block—and we’ve got an exclusive HD version of that show premiering here for the very first time, an appetizer from the new Blu-ray box set of The Monkees (available only from their official website).

“The Monkees Blow Their Minds,” which aired originally on March 11, 1968 was the next to last show before The Monkees was cancelled. The principals wanted to take the show in a new direction creatively and NBC wasn’t into that. This might explain how viewers came to see the surreal—certainly unexpected—sight of Frank Zappa (playing “Mike Nesmith” in a wool cap) and Mike Nesmith (playing Zappa with wig, rubber nose and false beard) beating the shit out of an old car. Zappa as “Mike” wields a sledgehammer while Nesmith “conducts” and we hear a snippet of Zappa’s “Mother People.” By the standards of 1968—or any year since when you get right down to it—it was a distinctly odd thing to see on television. If you’re forced to bow out, why not go out with a cacophonous bang?
 
Watch “The Monkees Blow Their Minds” in glorious HD for the first time, after the jump..