“The Blind Watchmaker” (1986).
 
The zoologist Desmond Morris has a secret life as a Surrealist painter. It’s a career he has quietly followed alongside his better-known day job as a scientist and author of books like The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo.

Morris has been a Surrealist artist for over seventy years. In his early twenties, he exhibited with Joan Miró. He managed to sell a couple of paintings while Miro sold none. Inspired by Dali and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Morris made two Surrealist films with his wife Ramona called Time Flower and Butterfly in 1950. When he failed to sell any work at his third exhibition, Morris made the sensible decision to study zoology at the University of Birmingham in 1951. He went on to earn a doctorate for his work on the reproductive behavior of the ten-spined stickleback.

But Morris never gave up on his passion for art. By day he was a zoologist, by night he quietly continued to paint. He even managed to bring his two passions together during an investigation into the “picture-making abilities” of chimpanzees. Morris exhibited a selection of the chimp’s colorful canvases at the ICA in London.

At a party in the 1960s, Morris met publisher Tom Maschler. He told him Maschler about his idea to write “a zoology of human beings and not even use the term human beings”:

Instead I’d write it as if I was an alien who had come to this planet and seen this extraordinary ape which doesn’t have any fur on its body.

It took Maschler three years to get Morris to write this book, which eventually became The Naked Ape.  Published in 1967, The Naked Ape has been translated into 23 languages and has never been out of print.  It made Morris rich and incredibly famous.

When he published his follow-up book The Human Zoo in 1969, Morris was wealthy enough to take time out and concentrate on his career as an artist.
 

The books that made Desmond Morris world famous.
 
Morris’s Surrealist canvases depict strange fleshy elongated figures which he calls “biomorphs.” He claims these biomorphs and his interest in Surrealism were inspired by three key events in his life. Firstly, the gift of a microscope that allowed him to see the strange microscopic world around us. Secondly, a medical book containing illustrations of intestines. Thirdly, an incident in his childhood when he saw war dead laid out on tables in a mortuary, their entrails unfurled, their bodies torn to pieces. Morris notes his painting “The Sentinel” harks back to this memory.
 
See some of Desmond Morris’s paintings and an excellent documentary on his art, after the jump…
 

An ad by auction house Robson Kay for ‘The Pink Panther Car’ credited to auto builder and designer Jay Ohrberg.
 
Before I decided to go to an actual (for the most part) college, I had given some thought to attending a vocational school so I could become an automotive mechanic. I was fascinated with cars when I was young and I still am thanks to my dad encouraging my curiosity under the hood. Somewhere along the line, I decided to become a journalism major, but my love of cars—especially Mustangs—has never faded. Which brings me to the topic of this post—a futuristic car constructed in 1969 called the “Panthermobile.”

The origins of the Panthermobile are, from what I can surmise, a bit contested. Many reliable sources point to the legendary car builder and designer Jay Ohrberg as the man responsible for the creation of the Panthermobile. Which is completely reasonable as Ohrberg has created and tricked out many other famous cars like the 1969 Dodge Charger from The Dukes of Hazzard, the DeLoren from Back to the Future and KITT the chatty car from David Hasselhoff’s other boob tube show, Knight Rider just to name a few. A quick visit to Ohrberg’s official site where his creations are cataloged which includes photos of a vehicle referred to as “The Pink Panther” car and also the “Pink Panther Limo.”

There are other sources that credit the great car designer Ed “Newt” Newton, the long-time pal of Rat Fink creator and fellow car designer and hot rod enthusiast Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Together Newton and Roth designed the “Orbitron”—a car comprised of parts of Roth’s 1955 Chevy, some Corvette valve covers, the backside from a 1956 Chevrolet and Lincoln breaks. Just looking at the Orbitron seems to lend more credence to the belief that Ed Newton is, in fact, the brainchild behind the Panthermobile which was built using the body of an Oldsmobile Toronado.

So who exactly came up with the idea for the Panthermobile? According to the book Americas Wildest Show Rods of the 1960s and 1970s authored by respected car historian Scotty Gosson, it appears that the design was conceived by Ed Newton and was then given to Bob Reisner of The Pink Panther Show.  Reisner then handed it off to a small team led by bonafide car legend and the inventor of the covetable “candy apple red” paint color Joe Bailon (aka “Candy-Apple Joe”) to build. This theory is also documented in the book by David Fetherston, Show Car Dreams. Now that’s some Scooby-Doo-style investigative reporting for you, Jack.
 

A shot of the impossibly cool interior of the Panthermobile.
 
The car itself was, of course, various shades of pink in and out and measured a whopping 23-feet in length. Behind the pink cockpit of the car lies a sick seven-litre engine and then something sexy called the “Pleasure Capsule.” This part of the Panthermobile lives up to its name as it is tricked out with a bar; pink satin upholstery; pink shag carpet; an old school pink push button phone and seats already in the recline position. It was also equipped with a little black and white television and a camera that allowed the driver to spy on the party going on in the back. The car was featured in a live-action intro for The Pink Panther Show cartoon during its very first season in 1969 which showed the car rolling through the streets of LA on its way to Mann’s Chinese Theatre, despite the fact that the Panthermobile never was, and probably still isn’t, street legal.

The Panthermobile was sold at an auction in 2007 for a cool $143,500. By 2011 the car had fallen into disrepair when it made another appearance at an auction in England where it was purchased by Galpin Auto Sports (who also credit Newton with the creation of the vehicle) in Los Angeles. The engine was toast, the interior of the car was a mess and the pink paint on the exterior of the car had been updated on more than a few occasions. Galpin’s restoration was so spot-on it is almost as though the Panthermobile had just emerged from some sort of super-secret hermetically sealed garage from the early 70s. I’ve posted a load of photos of the original Panthermobile and the new and improved Panthermobile below for you to check out.
 

The original Panthermobile.
 

 
More after the jump…

Tim Wilson, a full-time Arizona wildlands firefighter and part-time model with his trusty chainsaw. All photo credits to Chronicker Photography.
 
2018 will mark the third year that The Whimsical Woodsman and Friends have published a calendar featuring photos of rugged pin-up dudes such as “The Majestic Mountain Man” and kilt-lifting bad-boy “The Wistful Warrior” cavorting in the woods and such.

While it would be relatively easy to dismiss this awesomeness as a purely money-making gimmick at the expense of body shaming the burly calendar boys, I’m not going to do that for many reasons including the fact that body shaming is reserved for low-lives and Internet trolls. Also, when you purchase one of the calendars a portion of the proceeds from the sale goes to support the Arizona charity Books to the Rescue, a cause close to the hearts of the calendar’s creators Chad Castigliano and his wife Jasmine. The organization provides services to children in crisis by helping to provide comfort items to first responders such as cuddly stuffed animals and of course books. If that’s not do-goody enough for you, the calendar also works pretty hard to promote body acceptance—something we all benefit from.

I’ve posted images of some of the manly men that will be a part of the 2018 wall-candy calendar below. If you’d like to pick on up for yourself or a friend, more information on that can be found here.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Osaka Show 1970 was a hour-long musical produced by Valerio Lazarov for TVE (the national television station in Spain). It featured its countries biggest pop stars at the time: Massiel, Karina, Julio Iglesias and Miguel Ríos singing, strolling and galavanting through the amazing, colorful, awe-inspiring grounds of Expo ‘70 in Suita, Osaka, Japan. The TV special serves as a beautiful time capsule of the Metabolist movement. With a groundbreaking masterplan by Kenzo Tange and his team of a dozen Japanese architects, they successfully turned the expo park into a modern city with radical, urban design concepts which envisioned sea, sky, and space as future sites for human habitats.

The theme of Expo 70 was “Progress and Harmony for Mankind” and over 78 countries participated. As these Spanish pop stars take you on a utopian tour through the various pavilions you’ll see no shortage of incredible architecture, design, sculptures, waterfalls, skyways, modern furniture, roller coasters, monorails, animatronics, mirrored glass, domes, and people movers. Kenzo’s Tower of the Sun building which also served as the symbol of Expo ‘70 stands larger than life, Willy Walter’s Switzerland Pavilion illuminates with over 32,000 glass bulbs, while amazing details inside the pavilions are seemingly endless: The “Fuji Symphoni Toron” for example demonstrates a robot operated organ that could have served as the centerpiece of your living room today.

More after the jump…

 
Black Sabbath is directly responsible for some of the hardest and heaviest sounds ever created by man or beast. One fateful day in Birmingham, seventeen-year-old sheet metal worker Tony Iommi lost a couple fingertips in a bloody industrial accident, and the world gained heavy metal as a result. Well, Iommi claims it was an accident, anyway. Seems more like a deal with the devil, if you ask me.

Anyway, despite their well-earned reputation as the grandfathers of everything hard, heavy, and unholy in general and the architects of blood-freezing doom metal in particular, early Sabbath wasn’t always heavy, all the time. They mellowed the fuck out on occasion. Brit DJ Robert E. Lee proves the case with the incredible Balearic Sabbath, a 35-minute excursion into Black Sabbath’s most placid moments, a slow n’ easy Sunday morning remix full of free-flowing flutes, jazzy coffeehouse guitar noodles and softly banged bongos. From “Planet Caravan” to “Laguna Sunrise” to “Solitude” and back, this droopy-eyed foray into Sabbath’s gentler side is the perfect soundtrack to your next lost weekend.

Doom and despair have never sounded so groovy.

Have a listen after the jump…

 
A few nights ago I accompanied my wife to the ER. Before we left for the hospital I grabbed Cosey Fanni Tutti’s newly published autobiography Art Sex Music (Faber & Faber) and I’m glad I did. While we waited and waited (and then waited some more) I got really engrossed in what is easily my favorite book of 2017 so far, even as I haven’t finished it yet. After about three hours, when they finally called her name, I looked up from its pages and it felt like my neck was stuck and that I needed to see a doctor myself. It’s a fascinating read and I’m hoping I’ll be able to interview Cosey about it here in the coming weeks. (Quite a good excerpt appeared recently at The Guardian’s website.)

Now I don’t know yet if she actually mentions this in the book as I’m still a year or so behind in the narrative, but in 1978 Cosey appeared as a disco-dancing extra in the promo video that was shot for Sylvester’s immortal classic “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”!

She was asked about this by John Doran a writer for The Quietus in 2015:

Cosey, were you really in the video to “Mighty Real” by Sylvester?

Cosey: Yeah.

I love that song….

Cosey: It’s a great song. I was with a stripping agency because I was stripping at the time and for whatever reason, whoever was filming the video for him wanted to have dancers. So they got some dancers from Pineapple Studios in London. So they had orthodox dancers and they also wanted people that just danced. And not just disco dancers but people who were used to dancing in front of an audience or in front of cameras so they rang our agency. Three of us went down to the shoot (one of them was French Jane who used to do go-go dancing for The Who). All of us were given white satin shorts because it was at the Embassy Club and all of the male waiters there used to wear white satin shorts. Sylvester wanted the men in the shorts but he was stuck with these ten dancing girls instead. So the director said, ‘Will you dance to the music?’ Like you said, it’s a fantastic song but these Pineapple Studio girls were going, ‘...2, 3, 4, 5, 6,7, 8, 9, 10…’ [mimes intricate but stiff dance routine] And I was thinking, ‘Fuck me, it’s so regimented - why don’t you just listen to the record and dance?’ I think the director ended up using us and one or two of the girls from Pineapple who could let loose a little bit. But Sylvester got the boys in at the end. I think you can see them at the end of the video. He did get his way. I kept my shorts and I made a pattern off them so I could make some more pairs. They were really good for stripping in.

See the video, after the jump…

“Monkfish” and “Bishopfish” as depicted in the 1662 publication ‘Physica Curiosa.’
 

“Demons are the cause of many of the world’s ‘monsters.’”

Gaspar Schott, the author of the ‘Physica Curiosa,’ 1662.

Published in 1662 during a time in Europe when the lines between science and the supernatural were still a bit blurred, the Physica Curiosa was intended to be used as a reference for professors, scholars, and members the aristocracy. Authored by a German-born mathematician, philosopher, and theologist Gaspar Schott, the entire run of Physica Curiosa was done by hand. Illustrations of strange animal/human hybrids and other mythical beings were copper engravings which allowed them to be viewed in great detail as they were intended to be. Historians estimate that only 500-1,000 copies of the Physica Curiosa were ever made, making it an incredibly rare document full of what are best described as “monsters”

Schott was a prolific publisher of information and between 1658–1666 he put out eleven different publications including the Physica Curiosa—which was a part of his most influential body of work the Magia Universalis. The book, which got Schott in a bit of trouble with the Church at the time, includes fictitious depictions of sea devils, centaurs, demons and even humans with various deformities who were considered to be “monstrous” thus they were included in the Physica Curiosa by Schott. There were even real animals such as mammals indigenous to South America in the volumes. Twelve books in all makeup Schott’s curious publication which has been digitized by the Smithsonian Libraries with the final six books providing data on real animals such as elephants and rhinoceroses. I’ve included a large selection of images from the Physica Curiosa for you to ponder below. Some are slighty NSFW.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Ben Wheatley’s recent adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s masterful 1975 novel High-Rise scratched a profound itch many of us had had for years, but by rights we really should have had an adaptation from its own time, a brutalist B-movie with dissonant stereophonic music that should take its rightful place alongside Death Race 2000 and Logan’s Run.

We never got that movie, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pretend.

Adam Scovell has helpfully put together a marvelous trailer for a make-believe BBC series based on High-Rise using imagery from a really interesting-looking series from the early 1970s called Doomwatch that garnered controversy at the time for several episodes, including one that focused on mutant rats taking over the streets of London. The episode Scovell used is called “The Human Time-Bomb,” and it ran on the BBC on February 22, 1971.

I don’t know much about the plot except that the bland plot synopsis from the time sounds intriguingly Ballardian: “Dr. Fay Chantry performs a biological study of tower block life—and finds far more than she expected.”

On his blog Celluloid Wicker Man, Scovell raises a very interesting point, which is the possibility—one might even say the likelihood—that “The Human Time-Bomb” is actually a direct source for Ballard’s novel:
 

The Human Time-Bomb rather uniquely pre-empts almost all aspects of High-Rise in such detail that it must be considered whether Ballard himself actually saw it when broadcast. I have little doubt that he at least knew about the series, such was the crossover of the series’ goals with his own conflation of science and disaster.

 
He also notes that during this time, it wasn’t hard at all to find Ballard’s themes played out on the telly:
 

British Television of this period is brimming with Ballardian imagery; endless brutalist structures, obsessive emphasis on cars, violence and misogyny.  This is all compacted into a huge variety of drama, only ever really escaping from such aspects when a series or play was set in period.

 
Have a look at the trailer for the 70s ‘High-Rise’ that shoulda been, after the jump…

 
I dig these handmade tights that feature Siouxsie Sioux’s signature eye makeup. There’s no mistaking exactly who those iconic peepers belong to, is there? They’re made by Etsy shop Mass Media and sell for $22.00 each plus shipping.

According to the listing the eyes are only printed on white tights and must be hand washed in cold water and line dried.

I approve of this.

 
The Monkees ran on NBC for the first time in September of 1966. The brainchild of Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the program was a canny attempt to mimic the playful hijinks of the Beatles movies A Hard Day’s Night and Help! in a way that would attract viewers in the American TV system. The experiment was successful, to say the least, leading to two lively seasons of programming, a succession of million-selling albums, the strange and mesmerizing feature release Head, and so on.

Every Monkees fan knows that the four young lads weren’t really allowed to play their own instruments or write their own material, but over time they struggled mightily to garner more creative control. As a “manufactured” band that was constantly attempting to transcend or leave behind the synthetic nature of their origins, the Pre-Fab Four relied to a great extent on hired songwriters—until, increasingly, they didn’t.

In 1966 RCA Records signed a bright young singer-songwriter named Harry Nilsson—who had been doing computer work in a bank on the night shift and hawking his songs around town during the day—and in early 1967 Nilsson submitted some material for use by the Monkees. The two acts were essentially label mates—the label that released the Monkees’ albums, Colgems, was a joint venture of RCA and Screen Gems, which was the television division of Columbia Pictures.
 
So on March 17, 1967, Harry Nilsson recorded several demos for the Monkees. Among them was “Cuddly Toy,” which would find its way onto Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., which was released in November 1967. A month later, Nilsson would release his own debut, Pandemonium Shadow Show. 

Nilsson’s relationship with the Monkees grew over the years. Davy memorably sang and danced (with choreographer Toni Basil) to his “Daddy’s Song” in Head. Nilsson and Micky Dolenz became close enough that when Nilsson traveled to Ireland to meet his fiancee’s parents, Dolenz joined him for the trip. Dolenz occasionally used Nilsson’s London flat, a notorious residence in rock and roll history in that both Mama Cass and Keith Moon died there (er, not together, however).
 
After the jump, hear Nilsson’s demos for the Monkees…