Israeli artist Ronit Baranga uses white clay and acrylic paint to create beautiful ceramics and sculptures of strange and unsettling things. You may have previously seen her sets of cups and saucers with weird sprouting fingers and blossoming lips that suggest these once passive objects are now seemingly active creations that can scuttle away and deny their original use. The juxtaposition of the functional with the surreal creates a troubling unease.

Baranga has developed her ideas from crockery to children with her recent series Tattooed Babies (2017), in which she made life-like sculptures of innocent sleeping babies whose delicate flesh has been decorated with elaborate tattoos. Baranga believes it is easier for the viewer “to relate to something figurative and beautiful, something sweet and peaceful. It’s easy for you to look at it and relate to it.” Then, on a second look, the viewer is aware that something is not quite right, something deeply unsettling about this beautiful creation. Her intention is to cause a conflict between “attraction and unease.”

I was interested in the gap between the tranquility and absolute lack of awareness on the one hand, and the domineering act that will leave a permanent mark on the other hand. The tattoo as a metaphor for perception, thoughts and understandings that we “insert under the skin” of our children. Content that will become part of their lives forever, even if they are not aware of it now. Content that our parents have tattooed on us.

Born in 1973, Baranga graduated in Psychology and Hebrew Literature from Haifa University in 1997. She then studied Art History at Tel-Aviv University before attending art school at Bet-Berl College, 2000-04. Baranga liked both painting and drawing but it was working with clay that she found the best means for expressing her ideas. Clay offered Baranga something tangible and malleable, something strong and fragile. After art school, she started exhibiting her ceramics in Italy, 2007, and since then has shown her work across the world. See more of Ronit Baranga’s work here or here.
 
See more of Ronit Baranga’s work and devilish babies, after the jump…
 

 
In a recently unearthed 25-year-old fax to Elektra Records’ Howard Thompson, The Cure’s Robert Smith makes the “urgent” plea for a stack of awesomely-gory horror and exploitation VHS tapes.

Smith, who had planned to go shopping for movies in New York City, found himself without a day off when an extra show was added to their tour (believed to be the 1992 tour based on the dates and font on the fax). To make up for lost shopping time, he had a fax sent to Elektra asking for A Clockwork Orange, Driller Killer, I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left, Bloodsucking Freaks, Filthy Rich, Faster Pussycat! Kill!... Kill! and “maybe a couple of others you could recommend in the splatter-cannibal she-devil vein.” These movies would have been unavailable in England at the time due to Parliament passing the Video Recordings Act of 1984.

Smith had excellent taste in sleaze.

Former Elektra Records head of A&R, Howard Thompson, posted the old fax to his Instagram account, so it does appear to be authentic.

Continues after the jump…

 
La Jolla potatoes are no longer on the menu at Chez Jay, looks like, but patrons used to chow down on this dish cooked up by owner Jay Fiondella and his quondam roommate, Leonard Nimoy. The L.A. Times:

“Star Trek’s” Leonard Nimoy, with whom Fiondella roomed in the 1950s, helped him create what became a signature dish: La Jolla potatoes, a melange of mashed potatoes, bananas and cheese.

What did Nimoy contribute to the recipe? The bananas? The cheese? The garlic? The mashing? The browning? The “textural contrast”? I put it to you that, as Americans, we have not only the freedom, but the duty to investigate these questions. For as Leonard himself reminds us in a penetrating study of the Bermuda Triangle: “To say, in essence, that science need not investigate is to destroy the rationale for any scientific quest.”
 

Chez Jay in Santa Monica (via TripAdvisor)

 
This recipe for La Jolla potatoes from L.A.‘s Legendary Restaurants serves six:

8 x 8-inch baking pan, buttered
2 lbs. russet potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks
2 larges cloves of garlic, minced
2 tbsp. unsalted butter
1½ cups half-and-half
2 tsp. salt
½ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 large, ripe bananas, peeled and sliced
4 oz. Jarlsberg or Gruyère cheese, grated

1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
2. In a large pot of salted water, boil the potatoes until just tender (about 15 minutes). Drain into a colander and allow the potatoes to steam for 5 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, wipe out the pot, add the garlic and butter and return to the heat. Allow the garlic to turn golden, then add the half-and-half, salt, pepper, bananas, and potatoes.
4. Using a hand masher, roughly mash the potato mixture. You want to have a textural contrast of smooth and rough pieces. Season to taste, then transfer the potatoes to the baking pan and top with the grated cheese. Place in the oven to heat through and brown the cheese, about 15 minutes.
5. Serve at once or set the oven at 200ºF and keep warm until ready to serve.

Heavy cream, salt, cheese, starch and butter are the fuel that keeps healthy bodies frugging to “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” all day long. Live long et cetera.

The Devil and all his internal works.
 
There’s an episode of South Park where Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny try out different routines only to find “The Simpson’s Already Did It.” Looking at the illustrations of technological inventions by fifteenth-century Venetian physician, engineer, and alleged “magus,” Johannes de Fontana, (ca. 1395-1455), aka Giovanni Fontana, it’s more than apparent that whatever invention we think is new someone (probably not The Simpsons...) has already imagined it.

In his technological or mechanical treatise, Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum figuris (ca. 1420), Fontana imagined or rather devised a whole series of machines for use in war, traveling, entertaining children, flying, robots, rocket-powered craft, timepieces, fountains, and even a means of projecting images like a magic lantern. Unlike most other inventors at this time, Fontana showed the workings of his inventions—the pulleys and weights (sand, water) by which his mechanical devices worked. Most inventors illustrated their proposals “in action” as if functioning in real time, therefore, keeping internal mechanisms of cogs and wheels and what-have-yous hidden, thus to ensure they might be paid for developing such contraptions. Fontana presented his work with see-thru interiors, allowing the viewer to witness or rather imagine just exactly how this devil could fly or that vehicle move. This all well-and-good until one realizes many of these wonderful designs are utterly unworkable as they “do not conform to the principles of mechanics.”

Many of the ideas contained in Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum figuris focus on weapons of war like exploding missiles, mechanical battering rams and alike. However, Fontana did also include a number of designs for children’s toys and several drawings that scorched myths about the supernatural and the occult by explaining how devils and witches were most probably just robotic automata used to terrorize his fellow citizens.

A copy of Johannes de Fontana’s Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum figuris can be viewed here.
 

A mechanical toy.
 

More toy/entertainment for kids.
 

A robot witch showing how it would move on rails, have wings that flapped and arms that moved, and an ability to blow fire or air.
 
More mechanical illustrations, after the jump…
 

via oicVintage

CRIME fans rejoice! San Francisco’s first and only rock and roll band starred in a never-released movie filmed during June of 1978, and it’s coming out this year.

Details are few. A recent evening of punk cinema at the San Francisco Public Library advertised a sneak peek at something called San Francisco’s First and Only Rock and Roll Movie: CRIME 1978. In the two-minute trailer subsequently uploaded by Vimeo user Mabuhay!, CRIME mangles the Velvets’ “We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together” and Dirk Dirksen abuses their audience. The teaser promises the movie, “a Henry S. Rosenthal production of a Larry Larson film,” will make its “40th anniversary debut” this year.

Superior Viaduct’s primo compilation Murder by Guitar is still in print. CRIME fans who can read might also enjoy this feature from Ugly Things #14, in which Johnny Strike, Hank Rank and Ron “the Ripper” Greco tell the band’s inspiring true story in their own words. Or Johnny Strike’s Burroughs-inspired fiction.
 

A portrait of the late Amy Winehouse by Lee Bermejo. The illustration was done for Italian magazine XL and their column called ‘Dark Side.’
 
If you are a fan of comic books, artist Lee Bermejo‘s name is probably familiar to you. His work has been widely featured in modern adaptations of classic superhero comics such as Superman and Batman published during the 2000s and beyond for DC. Bermejo has many respectable accomplishments in his pencil box including an IGN Comics Award for his 2008 graphic novel Joker which also spent some time on the New York Times best-sellers list.

In 2013 the mostly self-taught artist was recruited by Italian magazine XL to do some illustration work for them. The concept, according to Bermejo, was to create images of famous musicians with superhero attributes. The column written by Ezio Guaitamacchi was called Dark Side in which Guaitamacci would detail the too-soon deaths of famous musicians, including many members of the so-called “27 Club” such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Amy Winehouse (pictured at the top of this post). Bermejo’s images are profound as they often depict his famous subjects in physical states not unlike the circumstances of their actual deaths. In addition to his poignant portraits for XL, Bermejo also did imaginative portraits of other music legends still with us such as Black Sabbath and Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. I find it morbidly amusing Bermejo chose to illustrate Axl lying in a coffin wide awake with two pistols, adjacent to a skull with a top hat which presumably once belonged to his pal Slash—who, by the way, is still very much alive.

I’ve posted Bermejo’s illustrations for XL as well as a few others below. Some are slightly NSFW.
 

John Lennon for XL.
 

Johnny Cash for XL.
 

Syd Barrett for XL.
 
More after the jump…

The 1976 lineup of AC/DC, L to R; Phil Rudd, Bon Scott, Mark Evans, Malcolm Young and Angus Young (chained to the desk).
 

“Bon was the biggest single influence on the band. When he came in, it pulled us all together. He had that real “stick it to ‘em” attitude. We all had it in us, but it took Bon to bring it out.”

—the late Malcolm Young on AC/DC vocalist Bon Scott and his impact on the band.

To be precise, the footage in this post of AC/DC playing a live gig at St Albans High School in Victoria, Australia in 1976 is 42 years old. And, as you might have hoped, there is a good bit of rock and roll mythology associated with it, especially when it comes to one of the songs they performed to a rabid teenage audience, “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll).” The song was written by brothers Angus and Malcolm Young with help from vocalist Bon Scott and first appeared on their 1975 album T.N.T. produced by George Young (RIP) and his Easybeats bandmate, Harry Vanda. It was also one of the first bonafide rock songs to include bagpipes competing with guitar riffs for attention, though the 1968 jam from Eric Burden and the Animals “Sky Pilot” was likely the first—but I’m sadly no expert as I skipped all of my “Bagpipe 101” classes in college. Now, let’s get to what is undoubtedly the best thing to ever happen to a bagpipe, Bon Scott, and AC/DC virtually combusting on a stage at St Albans High School in Victoria, Australia in 1976.

A few weeks ago the footage in this post was making the rounds all over social media, though it appears to have originated on a Facebook page dedicated to the roving teen gangs of Melbourne, Australia active during the 60s and 70s, the “Sharpies” or “Sharps.” In the raw, nearly six-minute-video we get to see riotous black and white footage of AC/DC slamming through “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll)” with Bon playing his trusty bagpipes. But was he? Forget those meddling kids, solving this caper requires the sleuthing skills of someone with a dangerous mind. And as luck should have it, I happen to have one.
 

A very young Bon Scott decked out in traditional Scottish dress.
 
Like the Young’s, Bon Scott was Scottish by birth (he and his family moved to Melbourne when Bon was six) and indeed had prior experience with bagpipes, having played the drums in a pipe band as a youth—a position he held shortly for AC/DC as well after graduating from being their roadie/driver. Scott’s skill with the bagpipes has been disputed in several books about the band, such as AC/DC FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the World’s True Rock ‘n’ Roll Band, and a book authored by former AC/DC bass player Mark Evans, Dirty Deeds: My Life Inside/Outside of AC/DC. According to Evans, Bon honed his bagpipe skills in the studio while the band was recording T.N.T.. The idea of using bagpipes in “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll)” was the suggestion of elder Young brother George. In this piece of video footage of the band being interviewed at the Mascot Airport in Sydney on April 1st, 1976 for Australian TV show Countdown, Bon quipped that since he had played a “bit of recorder” before (with prog rock outfit Fraternity), he figured he could also “play” the bagpipes. Scott also reached out to bagpiper Kevin Conlon inquiring about purchasing a set of bagpipes as well as enlisting Conlon to teach him how to play. Here’s Conlon recalling the day in 1976 he got a phone call from Bon Scott before the band shot the notorious video for “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll”:

‘‘I got a call from Bon, and he didn’t know who I was and I didn’t know who he was. He wanted to buy a set of bagpipes and have a few lessons. I told him they would cost over $1000 and it would take 12 months or more of lessons to learn how to play a tune. He said that was fine and came down for a few lessons, but as we were only going to be miming, he just had to look like he was playing.’‘

The Bon Scott pipe-plot THICKENS! Now it’s time to discuss theories as to why Bon stopped bringing his precious bagpipes out on stage—and the band’s eventual omission of bagpipes—live or otherwise—during “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll).” First of all, the challenge began when it took the efforts of Mark Evans, Phil Rudd and Malcolm Young to get Bon’s bagpipes to work after laying out $400 bucks for it, a virtual fortune for a touring band in 1976. Even with his recorder experience and help, Bon just couldn’t seem to get the hang of playing the bagpipes well enough. Then, George Young got the idea to loop in recorded and edited bagpipe music (all of which is noted in Martin Popoff’s book, AC/DC: Album by Album), over the PA during the song, which didn’t help Scott much. This led to a loud argument backstage between Bon and Mark after a gig which concluded with a frustrated soundman taking the bagpipe cassette and “smashing” it against a wall.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
It started with making false noses. Christopher Tucker was studying opera at drama school when he was asked to appear in a production of Rigoletto. He decided to give his character a noticeably larger hooter. He began fashioning different designs and discovered he liked making noses. That was when Tucker gave up Verdi and opera for a career as a makeup artist.

You may know the name, but if you don’t you will certainly know Tucker’s handiwork. He designed Mr. Creosote for Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life—“And finally, a wafer thin mint.” He came up with the designs for the lycanthropes in Neil Jordan’s werewolf fantasy The Company of Wolves. He also worked on Dune and even made an unfeasibly large prosthetic penis for porn star Long Dong Silver. Somewhere in among that lot you’re bound to have seen Tucker’s incredible craftsmanship.

He is best known, however, for his prosthetic makeup designs for David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, in which he recreated the severe deformities of Joseph Merrick, a man whose head was grossly enlarged and his body disfigured by an unknown disease—it is still a matter of debate as to the cause of Merrick’s illness. Because of his deformities, Merrick was exhibited as a freak in Victorian sideshows. The main problem for Tucker was not to make his designs look like “a cheap horror” but as “something approximating but not an exact clone of the ‘Elephant Man’.”

Lynch had originally planned to design the makeup for Merrick himself but the enormity of the task and his inexperience almost left the film without its “Elephant Man.” Eventually, Tucker was called in to rescue the movie and create its unforgettable makeup designs.
 

Hurt as Joseph Merrick, or rather John Merrick as he is called in the film.
 
The late, great John Hurt was tasked with bringing Merrick to life on the screen. Hurt was one of those rare and subtle actors who brought tremendous sensitivity and humanity to each of his performances. He was one of those actors the press often “rediscovered” every so often—as they did after his performance as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, or when he appeared as the deranged emperor Caligula in I, Claudius, or the broken, drug-addled Max in Midnight Express, or the vulnerability he brought to the doomed Stephen Ward in Michael Caton Jones’s film Scandal. But Hurt never really went away. He was consistently good in all of his roles, so good that the press took his quality of acting for granted, and only commented on his work when he was truly exceptional.
 

Tucker’s photograph of Hurt as Merrick.
 
It took seven to eight hours in makeup for Hurt to become Merrick. It then took up to two hours to remove the fifteen layers of prosthetics Hurt wore. The designs for the “Elephant Man’s” head and limbs were taken directly from original casts of Merrick’s body kept at the Royal London Hospital. The long, laborious procedure of becoming Merrick led Hurt to quip: “I think they finally managed to make me hate acting.”

The BFI has a fascinating interview with Tucker about his designs for The Elephant Man which you can find here, while below, Tucker and Hurt discuss the process of bringing Merrick to life on the screen.
 

 
I’m a giant sucker for heavy metal/shoegaze crossover. Whether it’s the post-metal of Isis or Pelican, or the black metal/shoegaze hybrid (I decline to call it “blackgaze” in deference to a gay friend who prefers African-American partners and who accordingly once made fun of me at great length for mentioning that I had been enjoying a lot of blackgaze) pioneered by Ulver and Alcest and made hip by Deafheaven, the unlikely synthesis of the brutal and the ethereal just hits me where I live.

Last week a band of that ilk released an excellent entry point to the subgenre—a doomgaze cover of an iconic Madchester song. Namely, “I Wanna Be Adored,” the lead-off track from Stone Roses’ 1989 eponymous debut LP, and one of the most stunning side-one-track-one songs in rock. The song was a strong declaration of intent, and was read as an answer to long time hometown fans who were disappointed that “their” band had signed a big-money deal with Silvertone, but the song had been recorded as early as 1985; its early provenance and the content of its minimal lyrics—“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me, I wanna be adored”—indicated that selling out was an impossibility as the band had sought pop stardom from the start. From Breaking Into Heaven: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of The Stone Roses:

The album, like their live performances, opened with “I Wanna Be Adored,” an ominous, throbbing baseline from Mani winding out of the darkness, lit up by golden notes dripping from Squire’s guitar. Towards the end of the song, the lyrics changed, gaining intensity: ”I wanna … I wanna … I gotta be adored.” Brown whispered the words for the most part—the approach that always served his voice best; his vocals were sexy and arrogant, insinuating their way into the listener’s consciousness. It was the Roses’ clearest statement of intent to date—nothing less than adoration would do for four men capable of creating something so special.

 
If that was the only Stone Roses song you’d ever heard, you could be forgiven for assuming they were a shoegazing band—it’s slow-burning, hypnotic bass groove and oceanically HUGE reverbed-out guitar sound fit well with that style’s signature tropes, and combining that with its lyrical conceit of swapping in Satanic possession for their desire for stardom, it’s a wonder that a shoegazing metal band hasn’t taken on a cover sooner. But last week, King Woman stepped up exquisitely.

If you’re not familiar, the band is a project of Kristina Esfandiari, a former member of Whirr (she ended her association with that band well before they infamously disgraced themselves) who also releases music under the nom de rock Miserable. King Woman’s Created in the Image of Suffering was singled out by Pitchfork as one of 2017’s best albums, and justly so—her music is a compelling aggregate of Mazzy Star atmospherics and the menacing drone of Earth, and lyrically, she mines fittingly dark territory—some of her work is a response to the trauma of growing up in a Christian doomsday cult. From an interview on the Sargent House blog:

I’ve had anxiety and depression since I was a little kid, but I also had a lot of trauma while growing up, so who knows how they’re all connected. But ever since I was in kindergarten I wouldn’t talk in school at all. My teachers would tell my mom, ‘Your child has the worst type of social anxiety we’ve ever seen.’ And I didn’t know this until I got older, she never told me. Never got any help for it, never took me to a doctor or anything. So I just suffered and didn’t understand that I was suffering because I was so little…Really timid, no real sense of self. I was raised in a very religious environment so I had no backbone, no identity. And that’s just such a bad combination with anxiety and depression.

When we started writing the first King Woman EP, was when it all came out. It took me a while to realize that there’s nothing wrong with my darkness. There’s nothing wrong (with the fact) that I have a sense of dark and light; it’s a perfect balance. And, like, we need both of them. And there’s nothing wrong about me writing about my experience, and there’s nothing wrong with me being honest about what happened to me. It’s helping other people and I am getting flooded with emails from people around the world, telling me their experiences, and I’m doing something right.

It was a shitshow after that first EP came out and I started doing interviews. I got awful threatening mail, I got Christians saying whack shit to me, like they want to pray for me and they hope I see Christ’s light, and my family was pissed at me for saying the things I said, but I was like ‘Fuck all of you, I have suffered my whole life and I am not going to shut up. This is my experience. This is my story, and I don’t give a fuck about what any you think, because I’ve cared long enough, and I’ve been controlled long enough, and I’ve had no voice for long enough, and there’s so much that I need to say.’

Hear it, after the jump…

All photos by Jason Ritter. 

The tl;dr here? If St. Vincent is playing your city on her current Fear the Future tour, GO!

Although I can’t claim to have been much of a fan prior to last week—I saw St. Vincent on an episode of Gossip Girl several years ago and that plus TMZ-type stuff relating to her personal life was just about all I knew about her—I’d read that the staging of Annie Clark’s current live touring set was something special (I’m a sucker for spectacle) and I’d also noticed that her new MASSEDUCATION album was turning up on many critics’ year-end lists, including that of Jon Pareles of the New York Times, who ranked it as his favorite record of 2017. So I was curious, let’s say. But I didn’t really know what to expect, it was more a situation of “this looks like something interesting to do tonight.” Don’t get me wrong, I fully expected for the show to be really good, or otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered.

The show was much better than “really good.” A lot more. She kinda restored my faith in… America, even, but I’ll explain that in a minute.
 

 
As a total “entertainer” package, St. Vincent really has it all. Annie Clark is gorgeous, mysterious, somewhat alien and otherworldly (though seemingly friendly). Her voice is, truly, as good as voices get. She’s a poised, confident, well-groomed presence. Her costumes call to mind Ziggy Stardust meets Wonder Woman. Taken as a whole, her many positive attributes as a performer, the stagecraft and the choreography, the entire presentation was a ten out of ten. Even without a band—Clark sings and plays guitar over a backing track—it was entirely mesmerizing.

But as a guitarist? OMFG. On a scale of 1 to 10, in my estimation, she’s about a 20. The evening before the concert that I attended I had been watching several Jimi Hendrix videos on YouTube, and as I set in the audience the next night, it rather strongly occured to me that she—without the slightest doubt—deserves to be seen as one of the greatest musicians of our time. Imagine the sweet spot creatively triangulated by Kate Bush, Bowie and Robert Fripp and this will give you a ballpark benchmark for the quality on display. (The concert’s unique staging, which began on the left side of the stage with the curtain drawing wider for each number, and used video projections to great effect, also called to mind Laurie Anderson.)
 

 
No really, Annie Clark is one of the single best guitarists I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Her concentration and hand-eye coordination was almost superhuman. It was utterly mesmerizing to watch her hands and the way she wrangled her signature self-designed Ernie Ball guitars. Like someone making sculpture out of electricity. I’ve honestly never witnessed anything like it. She is a Hendrix or Fripp-level guitarist, believe it. The performance was unbelievably accomplished. Mathematically precise. Watching her soloing was like witnessing someone doing differential calculus in their head, and then expressing this on a guitar. It was truly awe-inspiring in the most profound sense.

I was so uplifted by this concert experience that it occured to me, while it was in still in progress, that even in a world of complete and utter shit, Trump, Brexit, and just Tide pod-eating dummies everywhere, Annie Clark represents the exact opposite of all that. This terribly advanced artist was enough to make me believe that maybe the human race maybe hadn’t met its logical dead end. Additionally there’s something undeniably American about Clark and if you contrast her obvious intelligence with say, the worst of what this country has to offer, it seems possible that higher (r)evolutionary mutation might still save the day. Look I don’t want to overstate the case, but sitting in the audience, slack-jawed at what I was witnessing, I felt like I was looking at the… er… genetic contours of the county in a more accurate manner. Does that make sense?

I felt, for the first time in a long time, that things are going to get better again. Can you imagine getting THAT from a gig? In 2018?

And I still feel that way. If you get a chance to see St. Vincent live, GO!!!

St. Vincent plays the Hollywood Palladium Thursday night.

Performing “Los Ageless” on ‘Ellen’