The photographer and documentarian Camilo José Vergara uses photographs as “a means of discovery, as a tool with which to clarify visions and construct knowledge about a particular city or place.” Pictures, for Vergara, are the starting point in asking questions or linking to other images or investigating new territories and ideas.
Born in Santiago, Chile in 1944, Vergara started his career as a photographer after he arrived in New York City during the 1960s. He graduated with a B.A. in sociology from the University of Notre Dame, and went on to study an M.A. in sociology at Columbia University. It was while at Columbia that Vergara saw the potential in using photography to document the changes in the city’s urban environment and its influence on social behavior. This eventually led to Vergara’s work in rephotography—literally then and now photography—where he documents one location over a number of years or decades.
In 1970, Vergara began documenting New York street life capturing the children, families and communities living among the city’s urban decay. Vergara’s photographs showed parts of New York that looked like bombed-out war zones, deprived areas suffering the worst of both city and state indifference.
Since this early work in New York, Vergara has documented poor, minority communities in Chicago, Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles and sixteen other cities across the U.S.A. This work has produced an archive of over 14,000 color slides, numerous books, exhibitions and film documentaries. Vergara intends this enormous back catalog to form a basis for The Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto to “visualize how ghettos change over time, understand the nature and meaning of social and economic inequality in urban America.”
For his photographic work, Vergara’s has won a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2002, the Berlin Prize in 2010 and the National Humanities Medal in 2013. The following is just a small selection of his photographs taken on the streets of New York during 1970.
Girls with Barbies, East Harlem.
Fifth Ave at 110th Street, East Harlem.
South Bronx.
South Bronx.
More of Vergara’s powerful photographs from New York 1970, after the jump…
In 1576, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II chose Prague to be his home. More than any other person, Rudolf made Prague a hotbed of alchemical interest. Rudolf lived in the Prague Castle, where he welcomed not only astrologers and magicians but also scientists, musicians, and artists. In addition to noted alchemists Edward Kelley and John Dee, Prague was also home to the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the painter Arcimboldo, the poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, among others. Rudolf arguably spawned the most intense period of occult activity in history.
Celebrating this alchemical contributions of Rudolf II is the Museum of Alchemists and Magicians of Old Prague, located at Jansky Vrsek 8 on the western side of the Vltava. The museum consists of two levels of displays and tableaux that document Rudolf’s alchemists in Prague, especially Kelley. (There is a sister museum called the Speculum Alchemiae Museum, but that’s on the other side of the river, at Hastalska 1.)
The main floor has displays and replica artifacts of the trade alongside such fantastical scenes as a failed magician being stolen up into the ceiling by the Devil while cackling sorcerers huddle around the glowing runes beneath. The second floor, which claims to be the actual tower where the real Kelley performed his esoteric experiments if decked out like an alchemists lab, all aged scrolls and stacked grimoires, complete with a half-completed homunculus, the ultimate alchemical achievement.
The museum is more than a little sensational in its presentation, but to be fair these alchemists were likely more than a little bit showmen themselves. What better way to remember and learn about their arcane history than with a little bit of magical realism?
Here’s a peek at some of the treasures within. The first six pictures here come from Altas Obscura; all of the others (including the picture at the top of the post) come from TripAdvisor users. The mechanical model of the solar system is known as an “orrery.” Strictly speaking, you didn’t need to know that, but if you know the word orrery and along comes a reason to use it, you’re damn well going to use it!
In this truly ridiculous—and yet truly true—holiday PSA from the Seattle Police Department, a 73-year-old man who was stopped by a patrolman for not having his headlights on panics and does something incredibly stupid.
When I watched this, I was as incredulous as the utterly stupefied arresting officer was when it happened. He can’t believe what transpires. Neither will you. There’s dumb and then there is DUMB. The motorist is a 73-year-old WHITE GUY, too. All he had to do was sit there and not… well… do what he did!
Officer Nic Abts-Olsen was patrolling in the Colman neighborhood near Martin Luther King Jr. Way South and South Massachusetts around 8:30 PM when a man in a silver Toyota drove past him with his headlights off.
After pulling over the 73-year-old man, Officer Abts-Olsen checked his license and registration, and walked back to the Toyota, where he saw the driver portioning out a scoop of cocaine from a small glass vial.
When officer Abts-Olsen knocked on the driver’s car window, he apparently startled the man, leading him to spill cocaine all over his hands and the floor of his vehicle.
“Are you kidding?” Officer Abts-Olsen asked the man, who quickly tried to brush away the white powder. The man initially denied having any cocaine, though he admitted he had “vitamins” in his possession. Finally, the man relented, complimented Officer Abts-Olsen on his keen detection skills and admitted that snorting cocaine in the middle of a traffic stop was, perhaps, a poor decision. Officer Abts-Olsen also informed the man he had only intended to issue him a warning, due to his clean driving record, until the cocaine came out.
The head-shakingly bizarre encounter was captured on the patrol car’s in-car video system, and within a few days was turned into one of the best viral holiday “drive safely” spots that you will ever see.
Moral of this story? Don’t snort coke while a cop is running your license!
After attending a screening of Wild Side at a Donald Cammell retrospective at LACMA several years ago, I was startled to see the divine personage of Poison Ivy Rorschach herself waiting outside the theater. She had apparently come to see the next feature, Demon Seed, about which I knew nothing. But, reckoning that Ivy must be a world-class horror movie connoisseur, I rented it at the first opportunity, and it did not disappoint. It is one bizarre hellride of a motion picture.
Demon Seed is the second movie in Cammell’s slender oeuvre, following Performance, starring Mick Jagger, which Cammell wrote and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg. His father, Charles R. Cammell, was a biographer of Aleister Crowley, and if you’ve seen Lucifer Rising, you’ll recognize Donald Cammell as the actor who plays Osiris. His singular career included a script treatment for a “swashbuckling romp” called Fan-Tan, co-authored with Marlon Brando. (There’s an interesting documentary about the director’s life on YouTube, featuring interviews with Mick Jagger and Kenneth Anger, among others who knew him.)
Fans of The Simpsons will recognize Demon Seed as the basis for “House of Whacks” from the 2001 Halloween special, in which Pierce Brosnan plays the voice of a computer that becomes obsessed with Marge. A word about the content. See on the lobby card above where it says “Never was a woman violated as profanely,” etc.? All I will tell you about the plot of this movie is that, in one deeply disturbing scene, Julie Christie is sexually assaulted by her house. Not as in “she is sexually assaulted next to her house,” but as in “the actual building that is her house sexually assaults her.” Nor is that the strangest thing that happens in Demon Seed.
Spotted in the Telegraph: Mihai Marius Mihu’s interesting LEGO re-creations of the nine levels of Hell as presented in Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy, written in the 14th century.
Curiously, Mihu disavows any first-hand understanding of Dante’s work, saying: “I didn’t read the Divine Comedy, only the small descriptions of the circles I found on the websites. I didn’t want to be much influenced by the original descriptions because I wanted to give a whole new fresh approach for each circle. I thought more about the significance of titles and from then on it was only my imagination.” The nine LEGO panels seem pretty good to me, but I suspect a Dante scholar might have a few quibbles.
Click on any of the images to get a larger view.
I. LIMBO: “A place of monotony, here the souls are punished to wander in restless existence while they moan helplessly in echoes between the ruins of a temple.”
II. LUST: “Surrounded by erotic representations, those overcome by lust are forced to watch and experience disgusting things, ultimately being condemned to drown in the menstrual river.”
III. GLUTTONY: “The circle itself is a living abomination, a hellish digestive system revealing horrific faces with mouths ready to devour the gluttons over and over for eternity.”
IV. GREED: “This pompous place is reserved for the punishment of the greedy ones.”
V. ANGER: “In this depressing place the souls are trapped in the swamp, they can’t move and they cannot manifest their frustration which is making them even more angry.”
VI. HERESY: “The giant demon watches closely over his fire pit, dwarfing the damned that are dragging the new arrivals in the boiling lava. Those who committed the greatest sins against God are getting a special treatment inside the temple where they are doomed to burn for eternity in the scorching flames.”
VII. VIOLENCE: “A place of intense torture where the horrific screams of the damned are eternally accompanied by the hellish beats of drums.”
VIII. FRAUD: “In Fraud the Demons enjoy altering the shape of souls, this is how they feed.”
IX. TREACHERY: “Lucifer lies here chained by the Angelic Seal which keeps him captive in the frozen environment.”
Snuff started life as Slaughter, a dire exploitation film shot in 1971 by husband and wife filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay. The Findlays were prodigious in the field of exploitation. Whether working apart or together, they churned out films to meet current trends in the market, so cheap it was nigh impossible they could lose any money. One early production that Michael worked on (without Roberta) was Satan’s Bed (1965), starring the unknown Yoko Ono. The rest is a succession of cheese and grindhouse sleaze, including roughies like Body of a Female (1964) and horror pictures like Shriek of the Mutilated (1974). Slaughter was exceptionally bad, however. It fell between the cracks. Indeed, the film’s producer, exploitation specialist Allan Shackleton, had almost given up on it when he got the idea to film a new ending and precipitate its release as Snuff with a scurrilous marketing campaign.
Scrubbing all references to the Findlays’ movie, Shackleton removed the original title and credits and adopted a new title — Snuff, as in ‘snuff film’. Shackleton was ready to scratch a legend into the annals of exploitation history with a stunt comparable to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Orson Welles’ play that convinced 1938 America that Martians were invading Earth. Now, Snuff was primed to electrify the imaginations of a new generation, same as the old generation.
The next move was to engineer additional footage (running a little under five-and-a-half minutes) and splice it onto what was left of Slaughter. For this task, Shackleton hired Simon Nuchtern, a jobbing director with a handful of not altogether remarkable movies to his name.
In the newly-edited Slaughter, the scene cuts away to reveal the new material: A studio set with actors caught in the moment. Surrounding the actors are the trappings of movie making, including one archetypal bulldozing director.
The director confides to a pretty production assistant that the last take “was dynamite. That was a gory scene and it really turned me on.” She confesses it turned her on, too.
What follows is a stupefying descent into madness, and for the tawdry movie of the last seventy-odd minutes a contrivance as daft as it is unexpected. The director, wearing a t-shirt that bears the slogan VIVA LA MUERTE (Long live death), begins to lean on the girl. “Why don’t you and I go to the bed and get turned on… turn each other on, mm?”
“What about all these people watching?” she asks.
“Give ’em just a minute, they’re gonna be gone.”
Still in long shot, still in whispers, the director and girl engage in a little light petting on the prop bed. Contrary to leaving, however, the other people in the room slowly focus their attention on the couple, including the cameraman and soundman.
Point of view of the cameraman as the couple grope and fondle; the girl’s startled face as she suddenly becomes aware that the camera is on them.
“What are you doing? Are you filming this? They’re filming it!”
The girl struggles to free herself from the director’s pawing. “Don’t worry about it,” he says.
“You’re crazy!”
“Just move a little back up here — ”
“You’re crazy!” Scared.
“ — right back up here.”
“Let me go!”
“Shaddap!” Then to the crew he says, “Do all of you wanna get a good scene?”
Cutaway to the crew and affirmation.
“Okay… watch yourself… watch …”
“Let me up!”
“… watch…”
“Let me go! You’re crazy!”
The director calls for assistance. A member of the crew expressionlessly complies, holding the girl’s arms down on the bed, while the director reaches for a knife.
“You’re crazy. You’re not serious. You’re not really gonna do it,” the girl pleads.
“You don’t think so?”
“N-no.”
“Think I’ll kill her…”
The director slices through the girl’s blouse and across her shoulder. Blood (the colour of raspberries) oozes from the wound. She writhes and hollers.
“Scream, go on, scream!” the director demands. “That’s it, scream!”
The screaming becomes a pathetic sob.
Exasperated, he bellows, “STOP!! You want to play!?”
Following a few minutes of spectacular, if hardly convincing violence, the frame runs to leader-tape, then blackness. A whisper punctuates the void: “Shit, shit… we ran out of film.”
Another voice whispers: “Did you get it — did you get it all?”
“Yeah, we got it all.”
“Let’s get outta here.”
The sound of breathing. Ends.
The movie did not premiere with any of its stars in attendance (after all, they were supposed to be dead), nor did it boast any local luminaries. Not many people attended the premiere at all. Sixteen people in total turned out for the first evening show at 6pm. A uniformed security guard was on hand to make sure no one below the age of eighteen was admitted.
Ticket price notwithstanding, Monarch stuck to their original campaign and public awareness of the movie increased. By the time Snuff left Indianapolis it was already picking up momentum. More than 300 people attended the film’s opening night at the Orpheum Theater in Wichita, Kansas, on January 30. Many of those in attendance were “laughing instead of moaning”, reported a theater spokesman. Shackleton was driving the print of the film in his car from one engagement to another on its route to New York, ballyhooing it at every turn. Having traveled from Cincinnati to St Paul, he witnessed people being turned away from the box office of the Strand Theater on the day of its St Paul premiere, February 20. Pickets and adverse press weren’t only conspiring to stop him in this instance: The theater itself had been closed down by police the day before the scheduled screening, pending a matter of theater licensing. The resourceful Shackleton simply packed Snuff back into his trunk and drove across the river to Minneapolis, where it played an impromptu engagement at the American Theater, fittingly an X-rated movie house, complete with ads proclaiming its ‘ban’ in St Paul.
The trailer—not really all that safe for work—for Shackleton’s ‘Snuff’
The Adult Film Association of America was not happy with Snuff. Not surprising really. Formed in 1969 to protect the interests of those involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of adult motion pictures, the AFAA fought against negative representation, which included among other things child exploitation and rumours of so-called snuff films. Shackleton, hitherto a member of the AFAA, was unceremoniously kicked out of the organization because of Snuff.
Aware that it was all a gimmick and that no one was actually killed in Snuff, the AFAA nevertheless took pains to distance itself from the film. It was the sort of attention they didn’t need. President Vince Miranda, owner of the Pussycat Theater chain, announced that AFAA member theaters would not be screening it. But by and large, Snuff circumvented adult theaters anyway and played the regular houses. The AFAA unwittingly played into Shackleton’s hands when its members joined picket lines on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. “We called a press conference to say the film was a phoney,” recalled AFAA chairman David Friedman, “and that we were proud to say we would not show it.” But the AFAA were not the only group protesting Snuff. Women’s groups were also up in arms.
The absurdity of a theatrical motion picture that dabbled in actual murder (of a crew member, no less) was lost on some; likewise, that such a movie, supposedly having been ‘smuggled’ into the country, should turn up in New York City and openly promote itself on Times Square and around the country. It didn’t matter because lobby groups still protested against it, media still arrived to document the protestations, and officials continued to look into the matter.
But the protests outside the National Theater, which included the presence of ‘high profile’ FBI agents, didn’t stop the movie grossing over $300,000 during its first eight weeks and it certainly didn’t halt the publicity, which shifted into gears possibly beyond the expectation of even Allan Shackleton. Snuff was a rampaging publicity monster.
Killing for Culture available now in special edition—out in paperback next year. And below you can check out the official new Killing For Culture documentary, The Death Illusion: Murder, Cinema & the Myth of Snuff, directed by David Hinds and written and narrated by occasional Dangerous Mind Thomas McGrath.
In the eBay listing for this spendy Anton LaVey ventriloquist dummy, the seller, “haunt-master” makes the creepy claim that the dummy’s eyes have the ability to “move on their own” as if they were “haunted.” Because, of course they can.
In addition to the eye movement (as if this thing isn’t off-putting enough) the Satanic dummy can also crack a smile thanks to a pull string in the back of his head. Each Anton LaVey ventriloquist dummy is made-to-order, stands about 30 inches tall and comes dressed in black with a large silver pentagram necklace. Sadly, the skull pictured with lil’ LaVey is not included although I’m sure if you’ve read this far you probably leave at least one decorative skull out all year round. The bespoke LaVey toy is currently up for auction for $509.99 (which if you flip the nines around you get “666”) and ships from, you guessed it, Hell on Earth, Las Vegas.
I also included images of a few other notable dummies in the haunt-master’s shop that follow (the run from $300 - $550 bucks), such as “Regan” from The Exorcist, one of the disfigured doctors from the 1960 Twilight Zone pisode, “Eye of the Beholder,” the uber villain “Jigsaw” from the horror film franchise Saw and, a disturbing Michael Jackson that comes with straight or curly hair. Yikes.
Regan MacNeil (from the 1973 film The Exorcist)
Wait until you see the creepy Michael Jackson ventriloquist dummy, after the jump…
Here’s behind-the-scenes video footage of a 27-year-old bald eagle named “Uncle Sam” hatin’ on Donald Trump. The footage comes from a TIME photoshoot shot back in August for a cover story on a billionaire asshat running for President on the GOP ticket.
I’m not quite sure, but there might be something kinda symbolic here? Do you feel me?
The world’s new hero is Uncle Sam. Good on ya, buddy.
With her coy smile hiding as many secrets as the Mona Lisa and her iconic bangs which are still emulated by wanna-be pin-up queens the world over, Bettie Page was and is America’s Sweetheart.
Here’s a Christmas treat, just like Grandpa used to peep out in the shed on a cold Winter’s day: a gallery of lowbrow art photographs from the mid-20th Century depicting Bettie, celebrating the most wonderful time of the year.
, about which I knew nothing. But, reckoning that Ivy must be a world-class horror movie connoisseur, I rented it at the first opportunity, and it did not disappoint. It is one bizarre hellride of a motion picture. 
, and if you’ve seen Lucifer Rising, you’ll recognize Donald Cammell as the actor who plays Osiris. His singular career included a script treatment for a “swashbuckling romp” called 
, co-authored with Marlon Brando. (There’s an interesting documentary about the director’s life 
