Edgar Swank in cloak, two female members of the COS, Anton LaVey, Lois Murgunstrumm on the fireplace altar, and Diane LaVey.
 
The Black Pope, Anton Szandor LaVey, was, depending on who you ask, either one of the great 20th Century iconoclasts or merely a moderately successful con artist. Either way, LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in 1966, certainly knew how to work the press—and he certainly made good copy for the tabloids. His books The Satanic Bible, The Satanic Rituals, and The Compleat Witch sold millions of copies and his church, at its height, boasted of hundreds of thousands of members (though some have challenged those numbers).

A gorgeous hardcover photography book titled California Infernal was released in May by Trapart books in an edition of 400 copies. The tome contains over 100 rare and previously unseen photographs of Satanist Anton LaVey, as well as film star Jayne Mansfield and Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest J. Ackerman.
 

 
The photos, the work of freelance paparazzo Walter Fischer, capture LaVey at home in the infamous “Black House”, the headquarters of the Church of Satan, as well as at the “Ackermansion” and Mansfield’s Hollywood “Pink Palace.”

Though some of the photos are staged for publicity, many of the most intriguing photos are candid shots of LaVey doing relatively normal stuff. My personal favorites are a series of shots of LaVey geeking out over Ackerman’s collection of horror movie ephemera.

The majority of the photos were taken in the Church of Satan’s second year of existence. Anyone with an interest in LaVey as a cultural icon or in the history of the COS, would be well-served to pick up a copy of California Infernal by following this link. It makes an excellent companion piece to the exhaustive, and also-recommended, The Church of Satan, Volume One and The Church of Satan, Volume Two by former COS member Dr. Michael Aquino.

Here’s a gallery of some of the photos published in California Infernal which Trapart Books was kind enough to share exclusively with Dangerous Minds:
 

 

LaVey and “Forry” Ackerman.
 
More after the jump…

 
At DM we are yuuuuuge fans of the work of the Spanish illustrator Joan Cornellà, whose delightfully colorful and macabre creations have been warping our brains for a good many years now.

Cornellà‘s comics are invariably deceptive: they almost always appear to be targeted at children, quite similar to a Technicolor version of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, but the content of the panels is cheerfully replete with grisly and dark occurrences such as beheadings, bestiality, depravity, and the like. Our own Amber Frost took a look at Cornellà‘s marvelous work last year.

In 2015 Fantagraphics published Mox Nox, a collection of comics by Cornellà, and they have a Cornellà title called Zonzo that is slated for early 2017.

A few days ago Wilco announced that a new album called Schmilco (a pretty clear shout-out it would appear to Harry Nilsson’s 1971 album Schmilsson) will be released this September. It turns out that Wilco has had the good taste to outsource the duty of album art to Cornellà, as you can see above. I undertook some rudimentary online searches and was unable to find any previous album art by Cornellà. Lucy Bourton of It’s Nice That asserted that Schmilco represents “the first time Joan’s work has been used on an album cover.”

There’s more after the jump…

 
It starts around late October every year—the loop of Christmas songs played out over sound systems and tannoy in department stores and shopping malls across the UK. Songs by one-hit-wonders and novelty acts that somehow found a place in the nation’s heart rub along nicely along with festive number ones by artists like David Bowie, Bing Crosby, The Waitresses, Wham and Wizzard.

These Christmas compilations are a good little earner for the songwriters’ pension fund. The only downside being that some of these artists are now best known for their Christmas number one rather than the quality of their back catalog. It’s a fate that could almost have happened to Slade whose festive stormer “Merry Xmas Everybody” is now “credited” with starting the seasonal race for the Christmas number one.

But Slade aren’t just for Christmas—they’re for all year round.

Slade were Noddy Holder (guitar, lead vocals), Jimmy Lea (bass, violin), Don Powell (drums) and Dave Hill (lead guitar). They were according to Paul McCartney the heir apparent (along with T.Rex) to The Beatles and The Stones. From 1970-1975 Slade had seventeen top twenty singles, six number ones—three of which went straight to the top of the charts—and sold over six-and-a-half million records in the UK alone—a feat not achieved since the days of the Fab Four.

I was first introduced to Slade by my older brother. As kids we shared a bedroom which meant anything one of us played on the record player both of us had to hear. This is how I was introduced to a lot of music I might never have tuned into—it was a shared experience unlike the i-pod users today who dwell in their own little jukebox. Slade may not have started off as one of my favorite bands—but I sure as hell grew to like them and appreciate why they were brilliant and in their own way, very very revolutionary.
 

 
The album that started it all off was Slade Alive—one of the greatest live albums ever recorded. A garish red gatefold LP that everyone seemed to own. One listen to that whole album explains why Slade were such an influential and revolutionary band—go on just stream the sonic armageddon at the climax of last track side two “Born to be Wild”—it’s eight minutes and twelve seconds of Slade delivering the future of rock ‘n’ roll music.
 
More from Slade, plus concert footage in East Germany from 1977, after the jump…

 
It’s never too early to think about Halloween and, really, it is just right around the corner. If you really want to do something extra special and cool this year, why not sport this awesome needle felted costume inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis by Etsy shop RaeStimson?

My approach to this art project was to create an outfit that had the appearance of what I imagine a 1920’s sci-fi costume would look like.

This is a one of a kind costume. If you wish to purchase it I will adjust it to your size before sending it to you. Send me your measurements and please allow an additional two weeks before shipment.

It’s selling for $800.00 which seems a bit pricey for cosplay couture to me, but then again, I have no idea how long it would take to make something like this.

 
More after the jump…

 
Johnny “Guitar” Watson, who took his stage name from the campy Joan Crawford western was a highly influential soul, blues and funk guitarist whose career began in the early 1950s. Watson attacked his guitar strings so hard (“stressified on them,” as he put it) that he would often have to replace them during a performance. Listen to his 1954 number “Space Guitar” and tell me this isn’t the most crazy, sci-fi advanced guitar playing that was done in that entire decade. The man is absolutely beating the shit out of his guitar here. He’s also pioneering the use of feedback and reverb as well:
 

 
Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Frank Zappa were known to be aficionados of Watson’s innovative guitar technique and showmanship. In a 1979 interview, Zappa stated that Watson’s 1956 song “Three Hours Past Midnight” was his favorite song of all time and “inspired me to become a guitarist. Watson’s “Gangster of Love” was covered by Steve Miller and referenced, too, in Miller’s AM radio classics “The Joker” (“Some call me the gangster of love”) and “Space Cowboy” (“Some call me the gangster of love”; “Is your name “Stevie ‘Guitar’ Miller?”)

In the late 1960s, Watson’s slick soulster style pompadour hairdo gave way to a new look: fedoras, gold teeth, bell-bottom suits, platform shoes, huge sunglasses and flashy jewelry. Watson dressed like a pimp and acted like a pimp because—according to Sam Cooke biographer, Peter Guralnick—Watson was an actual pimp (because it “paid better” than music!)

More after the jump…

 
Slumber Party Massacre II, written and directed by Deborah Brock, is a horror comedy musical cult film that you need to see. Pay no attention to the haters at Rotten Tomatoes who called it a “a horrible movie, not a horror movie”—so the killer in Slumber Party Massacre II breaks into song. Like that’s a bad thing? How often do you see something like that outside of Sweeney Todd? Released in 1987, Slumber Party Massacre II was the sequel to (how’d you guess?) Slumber Party Massacre and there were others in the Slumber Party Massacre franchise, but sequels, prequels people, who cares about those other films…? This is the one you need to watch.

The story is all about girl rocker Courtney and her badass band of preppies going on a weekend getaway to a parent-free condo to have a girly slumber party. OF COURSE, their very 80s boyfriends show up and so does the driller killer. Before I even discuss that guy, Courtney’s awesome band of stone foxes “plays” (mines along to) music courtesy of LA-based group Wednesday Week.

The first number they “perform” called “If Only” takes place during a scene at their garage practice spot before they leave town.

Keep reading after the jump…

A metal bra and chastity belt by Yva Richard (modeled by Nativia Richard), 1920s.
 
My DM colleague Tara McGinley recently posted some fantastic vintage images of kinky boots—and as I share her admiration for rule-breaking women and fashion I thought many of you would enjoy seeing some more provocative images from the 1920s and very early 1930s taken in Paris of models donning the latest in French fetish wear.
 

Animal print panties with a tail by Diana Slip, 1920s.
 
At the time there were only a small number of companies that were actually making the clothing that catered to the robust bondage loving, whip and chains-wearing fans that enjoying living out their fantasies in the clubs of Paris and in the privacy of their own home. If people were getting their freak on in an iron bra and matching chastity belt (pictured at the top of this post) it probably came from France. Two of the pioneering companies that were feeding the fetish community with their playthings were Yva Richard and Diana Slip.

Yva Richard was the husband and wife duo of L. Richard and Nativa Richard. Getting their start sometime in the early 1920s, Nativia was not only the talented seamstress making Yva Richard’s signature risque lingerie, but she also modeled much of the companies cheeky creations and would routinely appeared in Yva Richard’s popular mail-order catalog from which the kinky couple sold everything from masks to iron restraints. The Richards’ biggest competition back in the 20s was Diana Slip—a fetish wear company run by Léon Vidal. Vidal’s collection while very much marketed to purveyors of kink had a slightly more sophisticated air and was not as overtly deviant as Yva Richard’s designs.

The arrival of WWII and the subsequent occupation of France in the early 40s pretty much put the kibosh on the booming fetish business and both companies as well as others closed up shop. I’ve included some incredible examples of what both Yva Richard and Diana Slip were designing for their fetish loving French fans that I’m sure will get your blood pumping. If they don’t, you might want to get that checked out.

If this kind of thing is your thing (I don’t judge and neither should you) the French book Yva Richard: L’âge d’or du fétichisme features a large collection of photographs that chronicle the history of the French fetish wear pioneers. That said, some of the images that follow are NSFW.
 

Diana Slip, 1920s.
 
More after the jump…

 
Here we have sculptor Patricia Piccinini’s ugly baby, Graham, a high-concept mutant designed to withstand car crashes. Graham’s unsettling physiology was created in collaboration with trauma surgeon Christian Kenfield and road safety engineer David Logan in order to emphasize how incredibly fragile our (comparatively attractive) human bodies are, and as far as public safety service announcements go, he really gets the point across. Our mushy little brains are so vulnerable in our (more or less) normal-sized heads!

I’m willing to bet Piccinini added the the row of rippling puppy nipples for shock value, but the construction of Graham’s skull in particular is very medically informed. Our brains are not capable of withstanding the impact of a high speed crash, and we’d need massively reinforced gourds to do so—so wear your damn seatbelt and don’t speed!

If you’re considering bodymodding yourself for optimum safety, you can look at Graham’s physiological “specs,” so to speak, in a 360 degree rendering online!
 

 
More after the jump…

 
To the extent that writer/musician Adam Gnade is known at all, it’s for a sparse and desolate talking-song folk music that sits on the raw edge of the New Weird America trip, often recorded very primitively and directly, a la John Lomax’s field recordings, or early Mountain Goats. His musical and literary output together comprise a singular and ambitious body of work—the same characters and plotlines continue through both forms, telling stories set in his hometown of San Diego.

Gnade has been prolifically releasing music and books for about eleven years, and his newest novella, Locust House, is being published by Pioneers Press in collaboration with Three One G, a record label run by Justin Pearson of the brutally spastic hardcore band The Locust (the band is referred-to in the book, the title isn’t a coincidence). Locust House is ostensibly a night-in-the-life story of a concert at a punk flophouse getting broken up by the police (and if it was based on a real-life show, it would have been a pretty fucking epic night), but the plot is only an excuse to take us deep into the inner lives of the characters, something at which Gnade excels. Among other themes, he explores scene members’ changing relationships to music and community as life advances, viscerally nailing that discrete, unrepeatable, life-altering thrill one gets when the right music hits the right young brain at the right time. It’s a feeling I’d love to have again, and reading Gnade’s words persuasively re-immersed me in that experience. (It also made me wonder if he’s read Ageing and Youth Cultures.)
 
More after the jump…

via Facebook
 
We are all big fans of Sinead O’Connor here at Dangerous Minds. Her voice is gorgeous. Her songs cut through lies. She is hilarious. She’s defied the music industry’s sexist, grab-ass bullshit. She confronted the Catholic Church about child abuse two decades before it was front-page news and paid the price for her courage. She is a real, actual artist.

On Monday, O’Connor announced on Facebook that she’s selling handmade, decorated illustrations. They are available in two flavors: sacred (without swears) and profane (with), though there appears to be some overlap (see “The Books of the Fucking Prophets” below). The sacred works draw on Sinead’s heterodox Catholicism, while the profane celebrate “Reasons To Fucking Thrive.” 

Sinead writes:

I make these as a hobby. But am now going to make a living. If you want to order and buy one for yourself with words of your own choosing or mine, please contact. Backstagebetty@icloud.com
Themes are only two… Scripture (no bad words) or Reasons To Fucking Thrive .
Send yours and get it made pretty..

I’m mystified by one or two of Sinead’s selections in the latter category (for instance, she big ups “Don Fucking Lemon,” not one of my personal heroes), so I would probably choose my own words. How about Sinead Fucking O’Connor?

Here are a few samples from Sinead’s Facebook page:
 

 

 
More after the jump…