Tales of headless ghosts or headless horsemen that haunted the night—most famously described in Washington Irving’s short story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—and the horrors of the guillotine were a source of inspiration for these gruesomely comic portraits from the 1800s to early 1900s. These portraits show a flipside to the orthodox notions of Victorians as no nonsense, straight-backed, straight-laced individuals, who would no more crack a smile than waste a nickel.
It also shows how keenly many Victorians (or at least those who were rich enough to have their portraits taken) were to embrace the advances in (novelty) photography—a practice that is still continued today by “paranormal street photographer” Krocky Meshkin and Edward Allan of the site Haunted Memories, who famously produced the “Buckley Family Portrait,” which proves we moderns can be just as gullible when it comes to headless hoaxes.
Finnish food behemoth Kesko has been ordered by its government to stop telling the public that their crappy meatballs have any actual meat in them. The manufacturers have been advertising that their meatball-like product is high in meat, which an investigation has proven false.
According to a story on Finnish news service Yle, Kesko has to rename their product “pyöryköitä” (“balls” in English) after a probe “revealed that it contained only machine-recovered meat, essentially scraps, which are not defined as meat…”
A rep for Kesko stated that the scrappy balls “have the equivalent of 52 percent meat. However according to current legislation, they aren’t those parts of the animal that can be described as meat.”
Considering how absolutely NUTS I was about the John Foxx-led Ultravox when I was young (the badges I wore on my trenchcoat back then were of them, PiL, Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen, TG and the Psychedelic Furs) it occurred to me over the weekend (while I was blasting their classic Ha! Ha! Ha! album in the car) that we’ve never posted about them on the blog.
Then I took a quick look on YouTube and it was obvious why we hadn’t: Slim pickings. Next to nothing and mostly unwatchable quality. Kind of a testament to how unfairly obscure the first incarnation of the band has become over the decades.
Most Americans, of course, have probably never heard of either incarnation of Ultravox, but we are not concerned here with the Ultravox fronted by Midge Ure—a fey Scotsman with a John Waters-like moustache—that recorded the Vienna album and had many, many top ten singles and albums in the UK after John Foxx left for an influential but ultimately very culty solo career. I hate that group. They probably should have changed the name, but that version of Ultravox had all the hits and can still play double bills with Simple Minds filling football stadiums across Europe (even if they could barely fill a small club here).
Thirty-five plus years later, it’s mostly only going to be rock snobs of a “certain age” who recall the John Foxx era, which is a shame because to my mind, that incarnation of Ultravox made some of the very best music of the late 1970s and it’s still fresh and exciting sounding today. They had a striking, original thing that they did and few groups since have explored the mutant wasteland that their music implied existed.
When Ultravox burst onto the scene in early 1977—not long after the Sex Pistols, it should be noted, they’d been around since 1974 playing as Tiger Lily—they took elements of punk, Kraftwerk, Bowie, the darker elements of Roxy Music (Eno co-produced their first album), Van der Graaf Generator and the New York Dolls and dressed it all up in an image that was equal parts A Clockwork Orange, Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs. It was almost as if they were the sort of post-apocalyptic rock group that Burroughs’ “Wild Boys” would go to see at the Rainbow in between servicing their clients from down the Piccadilly Circus Wimpy bar… or knifing them in the back.
“Come on, let’s tangle in the dark/Fuck like a dog, bite like a shark”
The lyrics were sharp, tart and full of wordy sci-fi blasphemy and violence. Imagine what this number, “Fear in the Western World,” sounded like bursting out of your speakers a matter of months after Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols had been released. Turn this up as loud as it deserves to be heard, okay?
I really wanted to come up with something that was quick, effective, that appealed to the urban city girl…There are so many mommy blogs out there that talk about using breast milk to basically help with skin conditions.
The salon sources its white liquid gold from “certified milk banks” only. These banks get their supply from local nursing mothers who are aware their boob juice will end up on strangers faces for $40 a pop.
A posting on Dallas Craigslist is purportedly selling a selection of guitars and amplifiers from the infamous Great White disaster at The Station nightclub. On February 20, 2003, a pyrotechnic display at a Great White concert at the Station in West Warwick, Rhode Island, set fire to the club and killed 100 people. Another 230 were injured.
The question that instantly comes to mind is: is this for real?
The solid money is on “probably not.” Judging by the text of the Craigslist ad, there appears to be an attempt at “sick” humor playing out.
“These instruments are not in the best condition,” can’t be serious, right?
“They could be worth a fortune someday when Great White gets inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” definitely can’t be serious.
If the items in this ad could be shown proper provenance, then one could suppose there’s some (hopefully very) niche audience for such morbid curiosities.
If, as it’s safe to assume, this ad is someone’s idea of macabre humor, then fair enough, I suppose it’s not the worst thing the Internet has ever stooped to. Today.
The “seller” may want to remind himself, however, that real people died for his Craigslist jollies.
Warning: this is one of the worst things you will ever watch:
Here’s a typo-riddled homage to the Bon Jovi song “It’s My Life.” Not only does the person sporting this sucker for life have the embarrassing misfortune of a glaring typo on their arm, just look how poorly that ink job was done.
Indeed, “It’s is My Life.”
I’m gonna assume drunk whilst tattooing or it was a bet this person lost.
These remarkable dreamlike images come from a 1924 book that came out in Germany called Buch der Hasengeschichten (“Book of Rabbit Stories”). The author published under the name Tom Seidmann-Freud, but her given name was Martha Gertrud Freud—her mother, Maria Freud, who went by “Mitzi,” was one of Sigmund Freud’s five sisters. Martha was born in Vienna in 1892 but her family moved to Berlin in 1898. As a teenager she adopted the name “Tom.” In 1920 she met a writer named Jakob Seidmann, whom she married two years later.
Tom Seidmann-Freud
In 1924 Seidmann-Freud published Buch der Hasengeschichten through the Peregrin Verlag (Peregrin Publishing Company). Over the next few years, she published a number of incredibly distinctive children’s books, the most famous of which is Die Fischreise (The Fish’s Journey) of 1923. As Marjorie Ingall writes in Tablet, “She hung out with Berlin’s avant-garde crowd, as well as with her family’s academic and Zionist friends. … Her style involved outlining folk-art-y, simple illustrations precisely in ink, then filling them in with watercolors. She frequently used stencils and paint together in a bright, lively technique called pochoir.”
In the space of few months, both Tom and Jakob committed suicide for reasons stemming from financial troubles. Sources differ on the exact reason—German Wikipedia says blandly that they had founded Peregrin Verlag, which ran into difficulties when the global financial crisis that started in 1929 arrived. Ingall isolates the problem with a separate venture called Ophir Verlag, which was to be a publishing company specializing in Hebrew books for children. That story involves a third party named Chaim Nachman Bialik, whose failure to live up to his obligations led to their suicides. Ingall cites a letter from 1925, suggesting that the money problems had been going on for a while, although the culpability of Bialik is simply not established in her account. Whatever the reason, it was clearly financial in nature; Jakob hanged himself in October 1929 and, now suffering from depression, Tom died of an overdose of sleeping pills in February 1930.
According to Ingall, during the Nazi regime her children’s books became destroyed in great numbers as part of the purge of Jewish authors—we’re lucky that her works survived the Third Reich, thanks for Seidmann-Freud’s family members as well as art lovers.
Will Schofield calls the book “whimsically apocalyptic,” which seems entirely apropos—I’m a little puzzled for his use of the term “rabbit dreams,” which seems a little misleading. Seidmann-Freud was trained as a Jugendstil artist, and her vibrant, imaginative, purposefully “flat” images definitely have a powerful, untethered, dreamlike quality all their own.
As writer William S. Burroughs once said (echoed in song by Laurie Anderson): “Language is a virus from outer space.” Were he still alive in 2015, it would be fascinating to hear his observations on YouTube comments, no?
Indeed, there’s something very, very Burroughsian about this brilliant video. Both the message and the reasoning behind it. STAY with it, because you’re gonna learn something. At first it seems like it’s some sort of academic psychobabble about how our personal “thought germs” behave like “a glob of snot trying to get into your brain” and end up infecting the entire Internet, but by the time you’re finished watching it, the whole world will make perfect (depressing) sense.
As a few folks points out in the comments on reddit:
pokingnature - This should be the video that everyone has to watch before being allowed on the internet.
Coneyo - How about every time they enter the comments section? But definitely it should only be a requirement for everyone else, because I don’t need to watch it.
Despite the sledgehammers, chainsaws and occasional police-instigated violence that became heavily associated with Plasmatics’ shows, the late, great Wendy O. Williams was first and foremost a gentle soul, with more than a touch of hippie influence. As a teenage runaway she bounced around the Rocky Mountains and sold crafts, moved to Florida to be a lifeguard and even cooked at a health food restaurant in London before making the stage her home.
Wendy was also an advocate for animal welfare and a vocal vegetarian. One might understandably assume that her dietary choices were entirely ethically motivated, but this 1984 interview from Vegetarian Times (see her as the adorable cover girl above) shows she was also incredibly health-conscious—a serious urban gardener who avoided drugs and alcohol, exercised regularly and sprouted her own macrobiotic diet from a Tribeca loft. Williams actually taught a macrobiotic cooking class at the Learning Annex!
The best part? The article includes Williams’ own super-hippie recipe for salad dressing—it actually sounds like a pretty intriguing flavor profile too. Save it for your next Plasmatics themed dinner party!
Wendy’s diet is very heavy on live foods and sprouts. The salad dressing is the result of experimentation in the blender and it’s rather unique in that it includes fresh greens chopped up into the dressing. She advises that its [sic] best to use two different types of greens; one for the dressing, one for the salad.
1 1/2 cups rejuvelac (soak a cup of wheat berries in 3–4 cups of water for 3 days or until berries settle; then strain)
1 clove garlic
1 Tbs. miso or soy sauce
2 Tbs. lecithin
1 Tbs. cumin
1 tsp. basil
1 tsp. oregano
Fresh herbs of your choice
Mixed greens (parsley, celery, sorrel, lettuce, spinach, or green
beans, sprouts)
Add seasonings to rejuvelac and whir in blender. Add, little by little, 1 pound of mixed greens, Until greens or chopped and mix well. Best when used fresh.
Below, Wendy and her fellow Plasmatics go on a safari with John Candy on SCT.
