David Huggins is 72 years old. He lives in Hoboken with his wife and son and works in a delicatessen. In his early years he was trained as a painter at the Art Students League of New York. At some point, during his “perfectly normal life” he “started remembering things.”

Huggins’ suppressed memories have gotten very detailed indeed. He recalls being abducted by extraterrestrials on numerous occasions, although “abducted” might not be the right word—Huggins’ experiences have mostly been pleasurable and he is quite content to assist the aliens in whatever way they desire. He says that he lost his virginity to a female “alien hybrid” named Crescent when he was seventeen years old. Huggins claims they’ve have had “over fifty hybrid-alien children” together—the details of their mating and the births are rather remarkable.
 

The artist and his work
 
Huggins tried attending abductee meetings but disliked them, they were too depressing—his experiences were nothing like that. So he turned to his art as an expression of his vivid memories.

Crescent is by far the most important alien in Huggins’ narratives. As he tells it, he was walking through a forest in Georgia towards a lake. He saw her sitting next to a tree. Crescent had a perfectly normal human appearance except for her head—her pale, pointed face had large black eyes and she was wearing a wig. They both disrobed and he soon lost his virginity.

Of his children, Huggins has given the following account:
 

I was taken into a room and it was filled with babies and I had to touch every one. The human touch was really important. The first time I touched one of the babies static electricity jumped from my hand to the baby. This was right before I touched it and I pulled back and said to the Insect-being “Wow, did you see that?” So I reached over and touched the baby. I woke up the next morning spent, totally exhausted and slept all day. But that night the Insect-like Being takes me to this door; we are in front of this doorway and there is this brilliant light. It was like it was pushing its way out of the doorway — it had form. The Insect-Like Being said I had to go inside the room with the light, so I go inside and it was just incredible. The light was passing right through me. I was in there for a few minutes. The next morning when I woke up I had incredible energy and felt really energized for weeks afterwards.

 
Fortunately for us, Huggins has harnessed his artistic talent to capture his memories, whether of real or imagined events. They display very good draftsmanship and use of color, and they are pleasurable to look at. It almost amounts to a perfect painterly representation of the entire “Area 51” mythos that has been such a familiar trope since the middle of the last century.

In 2009 Farah Yurdozu published a coffee-table book about Huggins under the title Love in an Alien Purgatory that reproduced many of his paintings—it’s available at Amazon for a reasonable sum.

Huggins is the subject of a forthcoming documentary by Brad Abrahams called Love and Saucers, which looks very interesting.
 

First Meeting
 

Our Son
 
More after the jump…

 
Never trust a critic. Most of them know fuck all.

Strange as it may seem now, Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner received a decidedly mixed bag of notices upon its first release in June 1982. Some newspapers scribes considered Harison Ford wooden; the voice-over cliched; the storyline way too complex; the whole damn thing butt-numbingly slow and just a tad boring. One broadsheet even described the film as “science fiction pornography,” while the LA Times called it “Blade Crawler” because it moved along so slowly.

But some folks knew the film’s real worth—like Marvel Comics.

In September 1982, Marvel issued a “Super Special” comic book adaptation of Blade Runner. This was quickly followed by a two-part reissue of the comic during October and November of that year. This was when those three little words “Stan Lee presents” guaranteed a real good time and Marvel’s version of Blade Runner fulfilled that promise.

The comic was written by Archie Goodwin with artwork from Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon with Dan Green and Ralph Reese. While movies have time to develop story, plot, and character, and create their own atmosphere, comic books get six panels a page to achieve the same. Marvel’s Blade Runner managed the transposition from screen to page quite successfully. The artists picked up on some of the movie’s most iconic imagery while still managing to add their own take on the Philip K. Dick tale. Williamson offered his own (cheesy) definition of the term “Blade Runner” at the very end of the story:

Blade runner. You’re always movin’ on the edge.

What???

You can read the whole comic here. Click on images below for larger size.
 

 
More from Rick Deckard , Roy Batty and co., after the jump…

 
Troll Cakes is a website dedicated to baking and delivering cakes to Internet trolls with their smartass comments emblazened right on ‘em. I like this. I also like that the cake is as ugly and as dumb their comments.

Step 1: They take the offensive comment.

 
Step 2. They make it into a cake!

 
Step 3:  They box it up and mail it to whoever said it. The box includes a copy of their original comment.

That’s it. Apparently if you don’t have your troll’s address handy, Troll Cakes will do some detective work and find it for you.

Here are some more Troll Cakes examples below:

 
More after the jump…

An illustration by artist Bill Ward featuring one of his impossibly busty blonde pinups.

When artist Bill Ward passed away in 1998 he left behind his large legacy of pinup illustrations that some comic connoisseurs have approximated to be at least 10,000 in number. Ward was a hugely influential force in adult-oriented comics and his work was featured widely in men’s interest magazines and the various Humorama digests, who coincidently were the number one buyers of comic art in the world during Ward’s heyday. One of Ward’s signature comic creations which he debuted in 1946 was a character called “Torchy,” a bubble-headed blonde who had trouble keeping her clothing on. Ward’s dangerously curvy girls and pin-ups were incredibly popular with Humorama fans, and there’s really no surprise as to why. His illustrations are infectiously sexy, and defy all logical body images, despite the fact that your mind would perhaps like to convince you otherwise.

Ward’s masterful use of the Conte crayon (an implement consisting of compressed powdered graphite or charcoal mixed with a wax or clay) provides another layer of intrigue to his pinups. He was an expert at being able to manipulate the medium in order to create a sense of tangibility to his sexed-up subjects, and his use of the material is nearly unrivaled. As you’ll see in Ward’s images in this post the use of the Conte allowed for a glossy luster to be applied to aspects of his pinups, whether it’s the tone of their platinum-blonde hair or a sense of shimmer to their ever-present thigh-high stockings. Ward’s women all possessed a slight air of irreproachability while standing around in stilettos and skin-tight clothing. According to Ward’s former editor Dian Hanson who worked with the artist at Juggs and Leg Show, it was Ward’s adeptness with Conte that helped set him apart as a fetish artist, as it gave him the ability to make the fetish-style clothing worn by his illustrated goddesses as alluring as the giant-breasted women it was clinging to.

Given Ward’s rather prolific catalog of work, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to showcase his blonde bombshell pinups exclusively as they perfectly represent his use of Conte and how the medium helps accenutate his bodacious illustrations. I also happen to be a big fan of blondes in general having been one all my life, so perhaps it’s a bit of the narcissist in me that wants to help perpetuate the notion that blondes really do in fact have more fun. If you’re interested, Ward’s work has been compiled into a few books including 2006’s The Wonderful World of Bill Ward: King of the Glamour Girls by fetish photographer Eric Kroll, and 2007’s The Pin-Up Art of Bill Ward that prominently features the artist’s exquisitely erotic illustrations. All of the illustrations of Ward’s gorgeous blonde pinups below are NSFW. YAY!
 

 

 
More buxon blondes and bodacious ta-tas after the jump…

 
Thurston Moore’s new album Rock n Roll Consciousness was released on April 28th via Caroline International. The new material was recorded with the same line-up of musicians he’s been working with since 2014: Deb Googe of My Bloody Valentine on bass, Nøught’s James Sedwards on guitar and Moore’s longtime musical collaborator from Sonic Youth, Steve Shelley on drums.

With a title like Rock n Roll Consciousness, and the way the press materials describe the new single,  you could be forgiven for wondering if Moore’s gone all New Age:

“Aphrodite,” a strange and heavy No wave rocker in salutation to the icon of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation, enumerates tools beyond the consciousness: electric guitars, the power of mind, imagination, will and intention to practice magick. Thurston sings of spells and possession as he and James pick up energies from string sorcery in a true group séance. Steve Shelley transmits the power of the symbolic into actual shimmering cymbal resonance and Deb Googe’s bass weaves a mesmeric psychic shaping — all in service to the mystic song.

Hard to tell. Maybe Moore has gone New Age on us—the lush psychedelic imagery seen in the “Aphrodite” video is light years away from that of Sonic Youth’s infamous collaboration with Richard Kern and Judith Barry on their “Death Valley 69” clip in 1985—but this certainly didn’t disappoint.

Moore’s North American tour is already in progress.
 

“Aphrodite” by Thurston Moore. Directed by Francis Coy (with footage from the Azores by Eva)

‘Multiple Maniacs’ poster on sale at Westgate Gallery
 
I wonder how many film snobs are out there who buy every single new Blu-Ray released by the Criterion Collection as a kind of Cliff Notes subscription to “Impeccable Taste in Cinema.” You know the type—if you suggest seeing a movie, they rush straight to Meta-Critic before committing to anything. I relish their reaction to Multiple Maniacs, John Waters’ self-described “celluloid atrocity,” a riveting, rancid, rollickingly funny B&W snapshot of everything we now cherish from his greatest work, of which MM absolutely must be included. It’s all here, all for the first time: corpulent diva Divine starring as a dominant, foul-mouthed, white-trash bitch goddess, narcissistic and deliciously cruel, yet oddly endearing and cloaked in charisma; the equally talented Mink Stole, creating the first of her many deeply disturbed fabulous underdog characters for Waters; Cookie Mueller (“a mean hippie who was recently released from a mental hospital”) and Edith Massey, (playing herself, a wacky barmaid at Dreamland Studios’ favorite dive, Pete’s Hotel); reams of overwrought, razor-sharp, quotable dialogue; vicious satire unleashed equally upon the Peace & Love generation and Nixon voters; striking jolts of surrealism which both pay homage to and parody experimental and art films; and plenty of scabrous, black-comedy shocks. It’s even better than amyl nitrate.

In Multiple Maniacs, the surreal and the shocking reach their mutual pinnacle in a jaw-dropping sequence in the second half of the movie:  Lady Divine’s mission of vengeance against her cheating boyfriend (David Lochary) and his brainless blonde chatterbox lover (Mary Vivian Pearce) is waylaid when a “religious whore” (Mink) lures Divine into a church to perform a rectal “rosary-job” accompanied by Divine’s orgasmic visions of the life of Jesus Christ (George Figgs), complete with miracles (the “fishes & loaves” here represented by canned cat food and Wonder Bread), Edie as the Virgin Mary and a positively Gibsonian crucifixion, all played for very queasy laughs, of course. 
 

‘Divine Saves the World’ stageplay/‘Multiple Maniacs’ poster from 1972

Historically the most difficult Waters film to see that’s actually worth seeing, Multiple Maniacs’ most successful cinematic run was as a pre-Pink Flamingos midnight show at San Francisco’s Palace Theatre circa 1971, where it became a deeply offensive sensation, often accompanied by live stage shows written and directed by Sebastian of The Cockettes, with titles like “The Heartbreak of Psoriasis” and “Divine Saves The World.”  Never blown up to 35mm when New Line Cinema began distributing it post-smash-Pink Flamingos, it got an “okay” VHS release in 1987, but never made it to DVD.  Anyone familiar with battered 16mm repertory prints or the shrill, tinny videotape may think they’re experiencing their own rosary-job hallucination—Multiple Maniacs looks amazing in HD (Waters himself remarked “Finally, Multiple Maniacs looks like a bad John Cassavetes film!”) and sounds even better. With one rather key caveat: due to music licensing rights- and cost issues, the entire brilliant, bootleg soundtrack of dozens of inspired songs from multiple decades has been replaced by a new score by composer George S. Clinton. Which is a truly tragic loss. This devil’s bargain does yield some choice extras: a Waters audio commentary, interviews with surviving cast and crew, and more.
 

Italian ‘Desperate Living’ poster
 
So as far as Golden Age John Waters in HD, this package is as good as it gets for now: Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble have yet to surface anywhere in HD, and while a gorgeous-looking HD Polyester is available for rental and purchase via Amazon Video, they used a version WITHOUT the flashing Odorama numbers… that stupidly retains the intro with “Dr Arnold Quackenshaw” explaining how to use the Odorama scratch ‘n’ sniff card (not hard to locate them even now if you try) which is essential to fully enjoying the film.  However, iTunes currently has Desperate Living in HD, so that could possibly mean a Criterion edition of this fucked-up masterpiece might be in the works. The sharp transfer brought tears to these perverted eyes—turns out it IS very pretty, what a town without pity can do.
 
More after the jump…

 
Signor Rossi—or as he was variously known, Herr Rossi, M. Rossi, Mr. Rossi and Señor Rossi—was the creation of famed Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto when he was just 22 years old. The character debuted in 1960’s Un Oscar per il Signor Rossi. Signor Rossi is a middle-class “everyman” (Rossi is the most commonly found last name in Italy) who would just like to live the easy life (have a vacation, buy a car, go on a safari, win an Oscar, etc.) but somehow always sees his dreams flounder around him. His comic misadventures, often undertaken with his sidekick dog Gastone (“Harold” in English-speaking countries), reflected the social changes then happening in postwar Italian society, including being over-worked and dealing with all manner of pointless bureaucracy. The trippy, ultra-colorful style of animation looked not unlike something that Peter Max might have produced. There were four Signor Rossi shorts made in the 1960s and another three were made in the 1970s before the theme music was changed in 1975 to Franco Godi’s impossibly catchy song “Viva Felicità” (“Viva Happiness”):

Viva, viva happiness,
Tried to catch it, no success,
Viva, viva happiness,

“Hello, I’m Mr. Rossi”

Mr. Rossi, what you want?
All the tray of ice cream cones,
A cocoa castle for a home

Custard cakes, coffee breaks, holiday, we’re all the same.

And then? And then? And then?
Mr. Rossi, what you want?
To drive a fancy rocket car,
Take a shower with champagne,
Tuxedo, Rococo, break(a) the bank at the casino…

And then? And then? And then?

Viva, viva happiness,
Tried to catch it, no success

[spoken quickly:]

Gonna-do-the-happy-dance,
happy-happy-dance,
viva-viva-happy-dance,
over-here-over-there,
over-here-over-there,
should-be-watching-aware
should-be-watching-aware

Sunshine (Sunshine)
Yellow (Sunshine)
Ocean (Ocean)
Lazy (Ocean)
Loving (Loving)
Someone (Loving)
Flowers (Flowers)
Daisy (Flowers)

This is what makes happiness,
You have more than you can guess,
viva, viva, happiness….

 

 
As there was almost no dialogue, the original cartoons had no barriers to being enjoyed by anyone in any language and the show became incredibly popular in Germany, Spain, France, and England. (The Disney Channel in America aired the cartoons in the early 80s). Godi’s theme song undoubtedly helped with the show’s success around the world. Once you have heard its whimsical melody, it’s difficult to ever forget it. If Mr. Rossi kinda/sorta seems familiar to you, all you have to do is listen to his iconic theme music.

Continues after the jump…

 
One thing I have to admit is I’m terribly afraid of bears. It’s a true fear of mine when I’m hiking in the woods or camping. It’s always in the back of my mind that I just might encounter one. That’s why this heart-pounding footage of a large brown bear chasing a mountain biker gave me a case of the “dizzies.”

YouTuber Dusan Vinžík caught this intense helmet cam footage as he was following his friend down a mountain. This all happened at the Malinô Brdo in Slovakia just a few days ago.

I’m not entirely sure why they stopped at the end—I would peddled like a bat of out of hell—but according to Mashable, they may have stopped because the trail had a switchback, “which would have put the bikers right in the path of the bear after it cut off trail.”

Either way, this is some terrifying footage.

 
From 1978 to 1986 the Police were an undeniable musical force, with five classic albums and ten U.K. singles cracking the Top 10. It’s a curious fact, however, that the Police were beaten to the charts by one of their own. In 1978 an act going by the name of Klark Kent—Stewart Copeland would always vigorously deny having anything to do with it—released a single called “Don’t Care,” which managed to hit the U.K. charts in advance of any song by the Police. In the summer of 1980, Klark Kent released a peppy mini-album of frenetic punk-pop.

Klark Kent took its moniker seriously. The name was obviously a riff on Superman’s alter ego, and in that spirit all of the original Klark Kent releases were on Kryptonite Records, and as many releases as possible were done up on green vinyl in honor of the one substance in the universe that can bring Superman to his knees. Klark Kent used green as much as possible in its album artwork and had a knack with serifs. 
 

 
In his essential book Punk Diary: The Ultimate Trainspotter’s Guide to Underground Rock, 1970-1982, George Gimarc describes the promo party for the release of the album on June 25, 1980:
 

Someone supposed to be Klark Kent showed up in a Darth Vader mask being towed around the room by Stewart Copeland of the Police. It’s a ruse that is transparent and well-blown, but Stewart is adamant that, “It’s not me, honest. Why do people keep saying that?”

 
Indeed, it was Copeland on all of the instruments—even the most cursory listen will reveal that the band sounds a whole lot like the Police circa Outlandos d’Amour.

The U.S. release of the 10-inch came in a 12-inch sleeve bearing a sticker that stated the following: “You have just purchased an I.R.S. product. Keep in mind, however, that this is no ordinary record. It has been specially sealed under clinical laboratory conditions guarded by 12 armed security officers. Upon contact with light, this 8-song album will shrink to 10 inches and turn green. Exercise extreme caution.” (Cleverly, the labels had a reduced diameter to give the visual impression of a shrunken 12-inch.)

The liner notes explaining the origin story of “Klark” find Copeland channeling Thomas Pynchon. The purported author is, ahem, “Sir Robinson Jeffries-Elder, Q.C., M.P., ex-diplomat, lecturer, bon vivant, and principal stockholder in the Klerk Kant Foundation, Limited”:
 

“Klerk Kant”, as appears to be his name, first came into my life as he was sitting next to me on the Concorde flight from Washington, D.C., to London. Speaking in what he claimed to be his native Sanskrit, he explained that he had been in Washington testifying before a congressional committee on church politics. His expertise in this subject had been attained while studying in a Moslem seminary in India. He underlined his religiosity (he claimed to be a “Sufi”, a kind of Islamic mystic that is rarely seen on the Indian sun-continent) by saying his noonday prayers in the aisle of the jet air-plane, jostling the stewardesses as they were trying to serve lunch, and annoying the passengers with his shouts of “Which way is Mecca? Which way is Mecca? Which way is Mecca?” while shifting his body to accommodate to the turns in the direction of the aircraft.

Later, he confessed, in sub-standard broken English, that he was “a mere computer programmer”, currently out of work but living on the sum of one million four hundred thousand dollars which he had won from I.B.M. in a successful suit against the company for stealing his “invention”. He was most secretive about the invention (“Do you want me to sue you? he asked coyly when I questioned him about it), but he adumbrated the notion that it had to do with capturing radio signals from distant galaxies, systematizing them through computer analysis, and reducing them to simple melodies which he played on the various instruments on which he is proficient.

I saw a great deal of Kent over the following weeks, sometimes in his elegant suite at the Dorchester and sometimes at my more modest digs, a bed-sit on Grosvenor Square. Sometimes he was morose to the point hostility, barely replying to my concerned questions with monosyllabic grunts. At other times, he was almost euphoric, waxing eloquent on his wide-ranging political philosophies. He would often descend to the vernacular, but his normal mode of speech was iambic pentameter in a-a-b-a rhyming pattern in which he produced perfectly worded, poetically beautiful expressions of deep moral intensity. (“I am a child ancient Syria / Suffering the pains of all this area” is an example.)

It is this peculiar combination of the profane and sacred which gives his music its unique appeal to young and old, simple and sophisticated, bovine and leontine, illiterate and intelligent, A/C, D/C, and A/C/D/C I, for one, like the underlying jazz sub-motif. My sons, being of primitive mold, see nothing in him but what they call “white collar punk”. In any case, to one and all, Klerk Kant’s music is the work of “true genius come home from a visit to the cosmos”, as the New York Times critic says. The eight songs of the disc run the gamut of KK’s extraordinary talents.

 
More on this mystery after the jump…

 
Other than the fact that the FBI, the Michigan State Police and Chicago’s finest all believed that Nine Inch Nails vocalist Trent Reznor was dead, 1989 was a pretty good year for NIN. The band released their first album, Pretty Hate Machine which contained the soon-to-be smash single “Down In It” that would help propel NIN to early stardom. Prior to the release of the first song ever written by Reznor, NIN headed to Chicago to shoot a video for the single. And that’s when this story starts to get very, very weird.

In order to achieve the aerial shots for the video, the crew attached balloons to a few cameras. One of the cameras decided to go rogue and floated over 300 miles to Michigan before landing in the middle of a cornfield (I told you things were going to get weird). The camera was then found by a farmer who, after looking at the footage of Reznor covered in cornstarch (in order to enhance his dead-guy look), surrounded by guitarist Richard Patrick and drummer Chris Vrenna, turned it into the police. The footage appeared to be authentically nefarious in nature to the cops who were convinced that the footage in the camera was either the product of some sort of satanic ritual, gang-related slaying or even a suicide.

If you’re a fan of NIN you may already be acquainted with this bizarre bit of history, especially if you also watched the television tabloid show Hard Copy back in the early 1990s. Hard Copy took NIN and Reznor to task then when they ran an exposé on the faux-murder and its lengthy criminal investigation. During the broadcast which originally aired on March 5th, 1991, the show used cheesy “re-enactments” of the “crime” as well as providing equally cheesy and condescending commentary by way of host Alan Frio and the glib curator of the segment, actor Rafael Abramovitz. They even included an interview segment with Reznor himself during which he shared his thoughts about the bizarre debacle:

“When the news came through that this was some sort of a cult killing, and that I had been killed, this great story, my initial reaction was that it was really funny, that something could be that blown out of proportion, and so many people were working on it. And I felt kinda good that the police had made idiots of themselves.”

More after the jump…