I wish I’d paid more attention in religious ed. class as I’m sure some ancient dude in the Bible said something about one of the signs of the End of Days was the turning of pizza into cake. I could be wrong but along with the prophecies of plagues of locusts, autotune ruining music, and a belligerent orange cartoon character in the White House, I guess it seems about right.

So, behold, ye non-believers, the Pizza Cake.

This savory-looking confection is the tasty handiwork of Natalie and Dave Sideserf of Sideserf Cakes from Austin, Texas. You may have seen this couple on TV making their very fancy cake designs featuring the likes of decapitated heads or Ninja Turtles or rainbow-farting unicorns. Or possibly you’ve seen some of their fine work on DM. Now this talented couple may have fulfilled some ancient prophecy by creating the Pizza Cake.

If you want to know how to make it then follow the instructions in the video below. Suffice to say, it involves an oblong slice of sponge, some orange-colored butter icing, some more white icing, some food dyes, and a lot of patience to create and paint the pepperoni and tomato sauce (which is actually jam and cake crumbs) topping. The end result will certainly satisfy those who can’t get enough pizza or cake in their lives.
 

 
H/T Geekologie.
 

A painting by British artist John Holmes.
 
From the time he held his first solo art exhibition in 1961, the art of British painter and illustrator John Holmes has expanded the minds of his fans with his imaginative take on monsters and other makers of mayhem. After hustling his craft hard in the early 60s, a few years later Holmes found himself busy working almost non-stop creating artwork for all kinds of publications including Playboy and UK women’s magazine, Nova. Later, Holmes would hook up with the art director for British publishing company Granada Books, and his ghoulish illustrations would be used widely on titles from authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon and perhaps most famously on the cover of the 1970 edition of Germaine Greer’s book, The Female Eunuch. Holmes’ floating female torso for Greer’s book was preceded by his disquieting work featured on the album cover, gatefold and back of Ceremony: An Electronic Mass—the collaboration of prog rock band Spooky Tooth and French electro-producer Pierre Henry .

Initially, Holmes’ work was much more abstract—a stark contrast to his strangely realistic work which would make him famous. His art was also widely used for the popular series The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories—and if you were a child of the late 60s, 70s or even the early 80s, I’m sure you will recognize at least one of Holmes’ eerie, minimalistic paintings in this post. Much of what follows is NSFW.
 

Holmes’ artwork which appeared on the cover of an edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Tomb (and other stories).’
 

The cover of Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow.’
 

Holmes’ cover for the 1973 book by Poul Anderson, ‘Beyond the Beyond.’
 
More after the jump…

The ‘domestic violence issue’ of International Anthem, 1979
 
This deserves more press than it’s received: a new book collects every issue of International Anthem: A Nihilist Newspaper for the Living, including two never before published. The volume is an official product of “the publishing wing of Crass and beyond,” the venerable Exitstencil Press.

International Anthem was Gee Vaucher’s newspaper, but denying its connection to the band would be a challenge. Its 1978-‘83 run coincided, roughly, with Crass’s (as opposed to, say, Exit‘s), and the Crass logo sometimes appeared on the paper’s cover (see above). Eve Libertine, $ri Hari Nana B.A., Penny Rimbaud, G. Sus (aka Gee Vaucher) and Dave King contributed to its pages.
 

Gee Vaucher collage from International Anthem #2 (via ArtRabbit)
 
The book contains scans of the originals (“bad printing, creases, mistakes and all”), reproduced at full size. If it is good to buy quality art books, it is better to buy them directly from the artist. Buddhists call it “accumulating merit,” and they say you want to do a lot of it in this life, so you don’t have to come back as Eric Trump. Below, consume two hours of Crass programming broadcast on Australia’s JJJ Radio in 1987, featuring some Crass texts read in Australian accents and contemporary interviews with Gee and Penny at Dial House.

Help Gee Vaucher collect 20 million hand-drawn stick figures for her World War I project.
 

 
It was hiding in plain sight, and yet it was almost designed not to be noticed at all. For several years from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, an experimental four-panel comic strip conceived and written by David Lynch ran in a handful of alt-weeklies under the title “The Angriest Dog in the World.” If you were the type of person who might have been flipping through the Los Angeles Reader or the New York Press or Creative Loafing or the Baltimore City Paper around 1987, you surely remember the peculiarly unfunny strip with the never-changing image of a tiny, spermatozoa-esque pooch straining at his lead in which the deadpan resolution was almost always a transitional nighttime image of the same godforsaken yard. 

It is said that Lynch came up with the idea for the strip during the long gestation period for Eraserhead in the early to mid-1970s, but it was only after the prominent releases of The Elephant Man and Dune that Lynch was able to convince anyone to run the strip. James Vowell, founding editor of the L.A. Reader, was the first publisher to bite. Vowell told SPIN in 1990 that Lynch drew the template for the strip a single time and sent it on, and after that it was the task of David Hwang, the alt-weekly’s art director, to receive the dialogue for each new installment from Lynch himself or Lynch’s assistant Debbie Trutnik, and draw the new dialogue on a piece of wax paper that was then superimposed over the strip’s template. (It’s noticeable that the handwriting in the captions changes over time, but I don’t know if that represents the input of different people or what.)

“The Angriest Dog in the World” had a memorable intro text, which was presented at the start of every installment:
 

The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.

 
The dog itself never did anything but growl, while whatever “action” there could be said to occur emanated from inside the house. Speech bubbles indicate the existence of human beings named “Bill,” “Sylvia,” “Pete,” who were apparently fond of trading street jokes creaky enough to make Henny Youngman himself die of embarrassment. A typical example runs:
 

Person A: Bill…. Monopoly jam?
Bill: What the hell is that?
Person A: They say it’s a game preserve.

 
Other times the strip veered into non sequitur, with pronouncements such as “It must be clear even to the non-mathematician that the things in this world just don’t add up to beans.” The introduction of fiery panels apparently ignited by an unseen hand on the rightward side of the strip did liven things up in a suitably apocalyptic register.
 

 
The evidence on the matter of the strip’s popularity was decidedly mixed. SPIN stated that in a 1989 survey, 20% of New York Press readers selected “The Angriest Dog in the World” as their least favorite feature, but when the Baltimore City Paper asked its readers what they thought a few years earlier, the outcome was 5 to 1 in favor of keeping it. In the mid-1980s an enterprising parodist named Jeff Murray aptly skewered Lynch as “The Laziest Cartoonist in the World.” 

In their volume on the director, Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc described “The Angriest Dog in the World” as “a masterpiece of minimalist cartoon writing,” nailing its appeal thus:
 

The simple, black and white, harsh style of the strip, with its nervous, edgy lines and picket fence suburbia turned into a Dadaist battlefield, would later reflect the look of his animated series Dumbland.

 
Oh right: if you haven’t heard about Dumbland, you really owe yourself a peek.

Lynch has always had a knack for writing against type, if you will: his “dramas” are consistently crammed with amusing and odd bits of business, and here, in what is ostensibly a vehicle for mirth, what you mainly get are stale punchlines and what must be apprehended as a considerable quotient of pain, no matter how ironically presented.

The meditating master of misdirection is notoriously hard to pin down on any subject, but David Breskin managed to get a straight answer out of the director in Inner Views, his charming book of interviews with famous directors:
 

Breskin: And what makes you the angriest dog in the world?
Lynch: Well, I had tremendous anger. And I think when I began meditating, one of the first things that left was a great chunk of that. I don’t know how it went away, it just evaporated.

Breskin: What was the anger like? Where did he come from?
Lynch: I don’t know where it came from. It was directed at those near and dear. So I made life kind of miserable for people around me, at certain times. It was really a bummer. Even though I knew I was doing it, there wasn’t much I could do about it when the thing came over me. So, anger––the memory of anger––is what does “The Angriest Dog.” Not the actual anger anymore. It’s sort of a bitter attitude toward life. I don’t know where my anger came from and I don’t know where it went, either.

 
The strips are difficult to find online, and those that are available are, for the most part, blurry and indistinct. To be honest, these self-consciously stupid strips are crying out to be collected in a book. Until that happens, we’ve presented a healthy collection below.

We’ll give the final word on the subject to Vowell, the strip’s very first patron, who once explained to Rob Medich of Premiere, “It’s just the same bad jokes. They’re really pretty dreadful. You can quote me. But they’re still fun. I think sometimes he tests to see what it would take for us to throw him out of the paper.”
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Is punk dead? It seems that every few years we have a newer, more embarrassing reason to justify its denouncement. Be it fame, the man, yuppies, or Malcom McLaren’s son burning £5m of memorabilia, punk rock has died many deaths—and it will probably continue dying until the end of mankind. The culprit? The mainstream media and its appropriation and exploitation of the punk subculture and aesthetic. The ideology at its core will hopefully live on. The look/uniform of punk? Why not be a hippie? You’d be being “more different,” right?

The modern porno doesn’t require much creativity. It’s hard to say whether the target audience has much of a preference for creative expression within the conversational narrative. And by that, I’m talking about the various situational anecdotes in which penetration occurs. You know, like the ‘barely legal’ sexy school teacher scenario, the plumber who ‘fixes’ more than just a broken pipe, or the busty MILF who gets it on with her horny step-son. I haven’t seen every adult film, but I would say it probably feels special when there is at least some thought put into explaining how these people found themselves in these most peculiar of situations. Otherwise, why keep it in there at all? Obviously we’re all there to watch people have sex, but if you’re going to tell a story, tell it right!

“Alt-porn” is a form of adult entertainment intended for those who cannot relate to the staleness of your average Joe skin flick. Films often involve participants of underrepresented cultures, like goth or cyberpunk, and actors are often tattooed, pierced, and have colored hair. The SuicideGirls are probably the most well-known example of alternative pornography, although the style dates back to the early nineties. Underground filmmaker Nick Zedd’s Cinema of Transgression was thought to contain some early elements of alt-porn.

Back in 2002, adult film producer Jim Powers released his own fleshy homage to the punk rock archetype with the truly hardcore flick, Little Runaway. The hundred-minute X-rated film features a cast of tatted, studded, and mohawked misfits, as they fuck to a soundtrack of notable punk ‘bangers’ by the likes of US Bombs, D.I., The Stitches, Lower Class Brats, and The Sick. The best of all is that this porno is an adaptation film and is pretty faithfully based on Penelope Spheeris and Roger Corman’s 1984 cult classic—and one of the greatest punk genre films ever made—Suburbia.
 

 
Little Runaway opens with Rachel Rotten, a suburban punk girl who struggles with the unreasonable standards of her monotonous home life. Her father, your quintessential sleazy middle-aged male porn actor, has removed Rachel’s rock ‘n’ roll posters and replaced them with dolls and other girly paraphernalia. “Halloween is over,” Rachel’s father tells her, physically threatening his daughter to change out of her Black Flag t-shirt. Rachel accuses her father of having a sexual relationship with her step-sister, which he denies. Then, without even skipping a beat, a very graphic sex scene begins, involving the father and his underage step-daughter.
 

‘Fuck you dad!’
 

 
Rachel hitchhikes to a very early-aughts Hollywood Blvd and soon finds herself at a US Bombs show. It is not long before Rachel is drugged by a creepy dude at the bar and is eventually carried off by her punk savior, Rob Rotten. Rachel awakes the next morning at Rob’s crash pad and becomes witness to a vulgar threesome in the other room. Rachel’s voyeurism turns her on and she is approached by Rob, who initiates certain lewd acts upon her person and in her mouth. Rob has a tattoo on his dick that reads “POISON.” He also has a tattoo of a Nazi flag on the back of his leg. Yeah…. ‘alt-porn.’
 
More after the jump…

 
Since he was both a Harvard math major and a member (along with John Cale and Angus Maclise from the Velvet Underground) of La Monte Young’s drone ensemble the Theatre of Eternal Music (aka “The Dream Syndicate”) it makes sense that artist/musician Tony Conrad would produce a hypnotic film that combined his studies in mathematics and structure with his interest in the psychoactive effects of repetitive or prolonged intervals of pure sound.

The result is “The Flicker,” a film legendary from being mentioned in dozens upon dozens of books on underground film, “expanded cinema” and the Velvet Underground. Few have seen it since the 1960s.

It begins with a message:

WARNING. The producer, distributor, and exhibitors waive all liability for physical or mental injury possibly caused by the motion picture “The Flicker.” Since this film may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment in certain persons, you are cautioned to remain in the theatre only at your own risk. A physician should be in attendance.

A frame then reads “Tony Conrad Presents” followed by a stylized quasi-Fluxus looking title card. The screen goes white. The screen goes black. When it starts to speed up, the stroboscopic effects are not just similar to—but in my opinion far superior to—the internal visions created by Brion Gysin’s psychoactive kinetic sculpture, Dreamachine.
 

 
Conrad told Hyperreal:

When I made the film “The Flicker” in 1965-66 my principal motivation was to explore the possibilities for harmonic expression using a sensory mode other than sound. The experience of “flicker” - its peculiar entrapment of the central nervous system, by ocular driving - occurs over a frequency range of about 4 to 40 flashes per second (fps). I used film (at 24 fps) as a sort of “tonic,” and devised patterns of frames which would represent combinations of frequencies - heterodyned, or rather multiplexed together. I was interested to see whether there might be combination-frequency effects that would occur with flicker, analogous to the combination-tone effects that are responsible for consonance in musical sound.

I don’t think he was whistling “Dixie” when it came to that warning, btw. If a strobe light can set off an epileptic seizure, surely “The Flicker” could. If I haven’t already scared you off, sit with it long enough and you can get a high that’s similar to bed spins without the nausea (I mean that in a good way!)

Here’s an excerpt from “The Flicker” on YouTube. Although it’s a little ratty-looking, you can still more or less “get” the effect. There is a clean version (that compensates for film to video conversion) that you can find floating around on torrent trackers and various “artsy” film blogs. I highly recommend looking for it, it’s really neat.
 

 
Dennis Wheatley was the eldest of three children born into a prosperous middle-class family in 1897. His father was a successful wine merchant based in Mayfair, London. After serving in the First World War, where he was gassed in a chlorine attack during the battle of Passchendaele, Wheatley joined the family business in 1919. He proved highly successful as a vintner.

He sold liqueurs and ultra-rare brandies, and at its peak the business counted not only the Duke of York (later King George VI) but a total of ‘three Kings, twenty-one Imperial, Royal and Serene Highnesses, twelve British Ducal Houses, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a score of millionaires’ among its clientele.

The work allowed him to socialize with those of a higher standing, which gave Wheatley pretensions towards a more aristocratic lifestyle. However, in 1931 during the Great Depression, he was almost undone by near fraudulent activities which badly over-extended the family business. Facing near bankruptcy, Wheatley quickly sold the business. He then decided to write his way out of debt and possible financial ruin.

Wheatley’s first novel Three Inquisitive People was accepted by the publisher Hutchison but was not published until later in his career. The book introduced one of his most famous characters, the Duke de Richleau. He also presented his publishers with a second novel The Forbidden Territory which became his first published novel. This book brought him instant success and was reprinted seven times during its first seven weeks in 1933.

The following year, he wrote The Devil Rides Out, which cleverly mixed the crime thriller with a story of the occult. Wheatley had read extensively about esoteric beliefs and various occult practices but relied on contacts he met through the politician Tom Driberg like Aleister Crowley, the Reverend Montague Summers, and Rollo Ahmed, to bring his knowledge up to date.

The Devil Rides Out was hailed as “the best thing of its kind since Dracula” and firmly established Wheatley as the “#1 thriller writer.” Since its publication, The Devil Rides Out has never been out of print and was made into a highly successful movie with Christopher Lee as Richleau and Charles Gray as the Crowley-inspired Mocata in 1968.

Over the next forty years, Wheatley wrote 65 novels and sold an estimated 70 million books. His tremendous success allowed him to cultivate the image of the distinguished gentleman he had long desired. To some, like the novelist Anthony Powell, this image seemed at odds to some of the “conscious drivel” Wheatley produced as a writer. His books mixed far-fetched comic book adventures with utterly gripping plotlines. Though his work was sometimes denounced for its ridiculous characters and racist stereotypes, Wheatley was often sought out by writers like Powell to give advice on plot structure and narrative.
 

That ole devil himself: Wheatley with his books and his war medals. (Photo by Alan Warren).
 
Despite a reputation for writing racy occult novels like The Devil Rides Out, To the Devil a Daughter, and The Satanist, and to an extent some of his more crackpot right-wing ideas (like a belief of an inevitable Communist revolution in swinging sixties England), Wheatley had a taste for the finer things in life. He kept an impressive library of books (mainly classics and works of non-fiction) and a well-stocked cellar of wine. His knowledge of the drinks trade led to him being commissioned to write The Seven Ages of Justerini’s, a history of the respected wine merchants Justerini & Brooks in 1949. This book included recipes for some of Wheatley’s favorite cocktails like this one for Nectarine Gin, which is an overly sweet recipe as “Wheatley had a notoriously sweet tooth and liked to serve it to as an after-dinner liqueur at Grove Place, his country house in Lymington, Hampshire.”:

Nectarine Gin

Prick your Nectarines all over with a fork and put them in an open vessel. Pour upon them as much Gin as will cover the fruit, and add a quarter-of-a-pound of soft white sugar with each quart of Gin. Cover the vessel with a cheesecloth and leave to stand, Give the contents a stir twice or thrice in the next forty-eight hours, then strain off the liquor and bottle it.

He also had one for a “meaty” Bloody Mary:

Dennis Wheatley’s Bloody Mary

One nip Tomato Juice, one Sherry glass Vodka-Smirnoff, one Sherry glass Campbells Beef Bouillon, one nip Worcester Sauce, half glass- Lime or Lemon- fresh, ice- shake until froth appears- serve.

I know what I’ll be drinking tonight while reading The Devil and All His Works.
 

 
Via the Greasy Spoon.
 

 
It wasn’t the usual practice for Jean Henri Gaston Giraud, a.k.a. Moebius, to wade all too deeply into the superhero genre, but he did tackle a few of the well-known DC and Marvel titans, including, among others, Superman, Wolverine, and Iron Man. Over the weekend, the irreplaceable comix artist Derf Backderf, author of My Friend Dahmer, related to his Twitter followers the strange story of Moebius’ peculiar Batman parody, which readers of the publication Penthouse Comix encountered in 1995.

According to Derf, Moebius had a concept for a Batman narrative that he took to DC, and “for reasons known only to them, they rejected it. That’s right. DC rejected a Moebius story. Sigh.” It ended up at Penthouse Comix, which seems to have had deep pockets. Penthouse Comix, which existed for 32 issues, was a pretty grim affair—Derf describes it as “a cross between Metal Hurlant and Eros Comics” and notes that “the whole run was high on creep factor.” You should certainly read Derf’s full thread (which is quite funny) to get a fuller picture.
 

 
The story is a rare instance of a Batman parody that could withstand the threat of DC’s intimidating legal team. Even so, Penthouse Comix/Moebius took pains to make it clear that the hero of the tale was not the well-known crimefighter Batman, despite all of the visual evidence in the comic itself. The story sort of has three titles: the first is “I AM NOT BATMAN” (that’s what appeared on the cover)—the first page of the story itself features two titles of sorts, one being “RATMAN BY MOEBIUS” and the other being “B*TM*N AGAINST DEPRESSMAN: A PARODY.” I figure that just in the few words already mentioned, the premise that this is Batman but is definitely not Batman is signaled about four different ways. Attorneys duly placated and/or told to fuck off, they could proceed with the narrative. 

In the story, the character variously referred to as “Beetman,” “Bootman,” “Buttman,” and “Bitman” confronts a jewel thief in what is later referred to as the “Supertherapist’s office”; this malefactor is “Depressman,” who eventually (with the use of costumery) sends the caped crusader through the gauntlet of confronting his own mother in something much like Freud’s primal scene. The entire comic is below—enjoy the sublime linework of the French master.
 

 
The full story continues after the jump…....
 

 
Lumerians, those psychedelic druids of the transdimensional extra-terrestrial motorik realms are returning. The genre-hopping mind-benders of uninhabited deep space are known for incorporating anything and everything into their futuristic sonic gumbo—pulsating krautrock, noise, free jazz, drone and dub. It will come as no surprise that after a four year hiatus they’re still experimenting sonically on their upcoming album, Call of the Void.

Vocalist Jason Miller explains: “If Transmalinnia represented the exploration of an alien world and The High Frontier a voyage through space, Call of the Void is a penetrative exploration of Earth through an alien gaze gone native—the weight of gravity, the build-up of pollution and sediment, experiences of ecstatic revelry and tragedy.”

The core founding members of Lumerians are Chris Musgrave (drums/percussion), Jason Miller (vocals, synth, organ, guitar), Marc Melzer (vocals, bass, synth) and Tyler Green (guitar, synth). The intensely interlocked rhythm section of Musgrave (sometimes he sounds like Jaki Liebezeit and other times like Tony Allen) and bassist Melzer undergirds what the rest of them do, putting me in mind of Can, Hawkwind, Neu! and Soft Machine at once, but I still can’t help thinking of them as The Ventures of this era.

Their third “official” album—not counting two collections of improvised compositions called Transmission from Tellos III & IV—Call of the Void, will be released on June 22nd on the London-based indie label Fuzz Club. The album is dedicated to the memory of Barrett Clark, Lumerians’ long-time friend, sound engineer and collaborator who passed away in 2016 during the tragic Ghost Ship warehouse fire. Recorded mostly at their own New Telos Sound studio built in the site of a former church in Oakland, California and at Hyde Street Studios—formerly known as Wally Heider Studios and the location of legendary recordings by the likes of Neil Young, Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Herbie Hancock, Creedence, Fleetwood Mac and countless others.

To announce the album the band have shared the lead single “Silver Trash,” a song about both “a very memorable camping trip us and some friends took in Big Sur or an encounter with inter-dimensional beings in the Redwoods of the Pacific Northwest.” Doesn’t sound like an either/or proposition! Listen LOUD:
 

 
We have their paintings, their names, and that’s about it. Araujo, Dorantes, Fzavala, Marin, Pérez, Luna, and Ortiz. Many more just disappeared or have been forgotten leaving only an unsigned canvas as evidence of their careers.

These were the artists who produced work for Mexican comic books and pulp magazines during the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Most were treated like casual laborers hired to churn out work on a daily basis to meet the massive demand for comic books. To get an idea of scale: it’s estimated that some 56 million comic books were produced every month in Mexico during the mid-seventies. This was when Mexico’s population was around the 65 million mark—that’s one helluva lot of comics and one helluva lot of paintings.

Mexican comics had first taken their lead from the influx of US comic books during the 1940s. By the late 1950s, they were producing new and original stories and characters specifically for the Mexican market. Titles such as Los Supersabios, Los Supermachos, Los Agachados, Las Aventuras del Santo, Tinieblas, Blue Demon, El Tío Porfírio, Burrerías, Smog, Don Leocadio, Zor y los Invencibles, Las Aventuras de Capulina, Las Aventuras de Cepillín, and El Monje Loco all became best-sellers. Unlike US comics which were by then bound by a comic’s code, Mexican comic books and pulp magazines were able to publish work uncensored. This led to the rise of more salacious, brutal, and extreme storylines and artwork.

In 2007, Feral House issued a book celebrating the best of these pulp and comic book paintings called Mexican Pulp Art. In her introduction, Maria Cristina Tavera explained that these paintings reflected “The fantasy elements reflect Mexican attitudes about life, death, mysticism, and the supernatural.” Interest grew in the subject and in 2015, a selection of some of these original works was exhibited under the title Pulp Drunk. While there are still many gaps to filled in over the who’s and when’s and what’s, there is still a massive archive of brilliant, brash, and dazzling artworks to be enjoyed and thrilled over.
 

 

 
More lurid pulp paintings, after the jump…