My father once bought several volumes of medical textbooks as a job lot from a secondhand bookshop. Why he did this I’m not quite sure. Perhaps he liked their fine red leather covers, their marbled pages, the beautiful yet gruesome illustrations of diseases contained therein. Perhaps he thought these fine volumes matched our home’s interior decor? Or maybe he hoped my brother or myself would one day study these antique books and become a medical practitioner? I certainly considered it. Indeed I nearly did apply for medicine at university but changed my mind at the last moment and chose a rather pointless arts course—my real intention had been to go to Art College and paint…but that’s another story.

However, I did spend many, many, probably far too many hours poring over these books and their fabulous colored plates of medical diseases, internal organs, autopsies, arterial systems, genitals, brains and what have you. I marveled as much at the complexity and wonder of the human body and its diseases as I did at the beauty of the illustrations. These were to me works of art that deserved to be hung in some gallery rather than just hidden away for the education of young minds.

Illustrations of different diseases and conditions provided an essential part in the development of medical treatment. All doctors need a good memory so they can recognize symptoms, ailments and you know body parts—and the work of illustrators in accurately depicting different forms of diseases—leprosy, syphilis or smallpox, etc—were central to a doctor making the right call in a patient’s’ diagnosis and treatment.

This is a tiny small collection of some of the vast number of disturbingly beautiful illustrations produced by artists for medical practitioners during the late 1700s to the early 1900s—and they are quite fantastic.

And the moral of my story? Well, if you ever get the choice between an arts course and studying medicine…do medicine because you can truly help people and maybe even make a shit load of money while you’re doing it.
 

A thirteen-year-old Girl with leprosy.
 

A thirteen-year-old Boy with severe untreated leprosy.
 
More beautifully rendered (and totally gross) diseases after the jump…

 
I blog about French music producer Drixxxe‘s superb mixes of songs from ‘70s softcore porn-y films every time he releases a new one. Drixxxe just added another mix to the “Sextape” theme and it’s good. Like really good. Listen to it, below.

A lot of these mixes don’t have tracklists, but some of songs come from films like Sessomatto, Black Lolita, Aunt Peg, Madame Claude, Emmanuelle and the Girls of Madame Claude, Vampyros Lesbos, Sex O’Clock USA, Skin Flicks, Odyssey, Le Sex Shop and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals and many, many more.

If you can’t get enough of the “Sextape” series, click here to listen to more mixes. There’s hours and hours of this softcore music for your pleasure awaiting you. What are you waiting for? Call now…

 
Though due to to time, place, and sound, the Jam are closely associated with the London punk explosion of the late ‘70s, their musical and extra-musical ethos were often directly contrary to punk’s year-zero outlook, paying open obeisance to ‘60s groups that punk sought to outright reject. Though they shared punk’s focused anger and political engagement, the band embraced the posh fashions, R&B influence, and speed-freak energy of the mod movement which, having peaked and ebbed a dozen years earlier, was tremendously passé even to non-cognoscenti, and singer/guitarist Paul Weller’s schoolgirl crush on the Who couldn’t have been more blatant.
 

Case in point.

So unpunk were the Jam considered in some circles that no less a Godhead than Joe Strummer of the Clash called them out as frauds in one of his band’s greatest songs, “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” In the song’s second half, Strummer addresses disillusionment with punk’s direction, and the verse

The new groups are not concerned
with what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, you think it’s funny
turning rebellion into money

has long been considered a direct stab at the Jam, who at the time had recently made a point of proclaiming a baffling loyalty to the Tories. (In later years, Weller would refer to Margaret Thatcher as “absolute fucking scum” and “a traitor to the people,” so don’t hold that early Conservative support against him.) Strummer demurely claimed he was taking aim at power-pop more generally, but the “Burton suits” line seemed mighty specific.

Keep reading after the jump…

A massive hair dryer from 1934.
 
Some of our readers will recall a time when it seemed like a good idea to strap a plastic bag to your head (when it was still wet mind you) then hook it up to a large device that would blow hot hair into said bag in order to dry your hair. Sometimes I really do believe it is a fucking miracle that more people born in decades preceding the 1970s didn’t die after putting hot plastic bags on their wet heads. Even as a kid back in the 70s I thought on more than one occasion that I was going to come out with a perfectly red ring around my skull after sitting under a soft-bonnet style hair dryer. But that never happened. Thanks, Mom!
 

A drawing of the first hair dryer invented by Alexandre Godefoy in 1888. 
 
Some of these space-aged looking contraptions date as far back as the early 1920s and could be found in public bath houses. In 1930, German hair care company Wella debuted a motorized dryer that looked like it was straight out of a scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (pictured directly below). Others are just too wacky for words but as a girl with long hair—I get it. Before the advent of the hair dryer women would dry their hair by a fire (yikes!) or just let it dry on its own. The first hair dryer originated in 1888 in a beauty salon in France owned by Alexandre Godefroy (pictured above) that attached to a pipe for a chimney or a gas stove and blew hot air through a giant alien-looking metal helmet. In the words of those Virginia Slim ads “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” when it comes to hair maintenance. Lots of images of far-out looking hair dryers of yesteryear follow.
 

Wella’s first motorized hair dryer from 1930.
 

1920s.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
A few months ago we learned that Woody Guthrie once wrote a righteously angry protest song about Donald Trump’s slumlord dad, an occurrence that could only be topped by, say, a righteously angry comic strip penned by R. Crumb about his son, the ultra-wealthy asshole currently running for President of these United States of America.

Such a thing actually fucking exists!

In 1991 Crumb left America for France, but before he did so he put out “Point the Finger,” a comic about a certain over-publicized real estate mogul that appeared in his short run of Hup comics (Issue #3). In the five-page strip, “Crumb” (the character) has a run-in with Trump, whom he calls “one of the more visible big time predators who feed on society” and “one of the most evil men alive.” He also says, “Hey Don—Ugh! You’re so hateful I can’t even look at you!”
 

 
He enlists his chums Tracy and Marny to introduce Trump’s face to the inside of a toilet bowl. And then the three of them (not Trump—ew) have sex.

You can read the entire strip here, but be warned—it’s most definitely NSFW.

The well-known comix artist R. Sikoryak, likely best known for Masterpiece Comics, has posted a handful of non-NSFW images from “Point the Finger” on his blog, which we’ve reproduced here.

You can buy Hup 1-4 for just $30.
 

 
More after the jump…

Here he/she the fifth flatmate is, posing in a group photo—not even a still from the show. “Cousin It” much?
 
It’s like a gag straight out of Arrested Development, one that rewards maximum viewer attention and perceptual skills, and no small amount of repeat viewing. It also reminds one of the brilliant trick in The Simpsons, of embedding an entire Schwarzenegger-ish action movie called ‘McBain’, one small snippet at a time, over dozens of episodes.

So it seems that The Young Ones, the celebrated “punk sitcom” that ran on BBC2 from 1982 to 1984 and on MTV starting in 1985, had a running gag buried so incredibly deep that it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that nearly nobody noticed that it was even happening… for years.

Anyone who knows the show can list off the four flatmates in a matter of seconds—Neil, Rick (“Prick”), Vyvyan, and Mike-the-Cool-Person.

Four flatmates, easy peasy, right? But wait—there were actually five flatmates, and one of them never was given a single line of dialogue and could only be spotted in the background of scenes while other action was happening. Not just in a single episode or anything like that, but in every single episode of the first series. That constitutes 6 of the 12 episodes that were produced, the relevant episode titles are “Demolition,” “Oil,” “Boring,” “Bomb,” “Interesting,” and “Flood.” (These episodes featured musical apparances by Madness and Dexys Midnight Runners. Motörhead was in Series 2.)
 

Murky but unmistakable: The fifth flatmate
 
The fifth flatmate doesn’t have a name and, judging from his (her?) hairstyle, appears to have been a homage of sorts to Cousin It from The Addams Family.

Hilariously, one of the creators of the show, Ben Elton, was asked about the mysterious figure and he claimed to have zero knowledge of the character: “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about I’m afraid. There were four housemates plus the Landlord.”

However, a director from the show confirmed that the extra person in the scenes was not an accident. Geoff Posner went on the record thus:
 

So if my memory serves me correctly, Paul Jackson and I thought it would be fun to have some ghostly figure in the background of some scenes that was never explained or talked about. Hair all over the face so you shouldn’t be able to decipher gender either. The fact we forgot to do it consistently through the series shows what a bunch of amateurs we were in them days.

 
The findings were posted on YouTube—below you can click on the case for the prosecution. My mind is blown!
 

 
via Business Insider Australia

 
Here’s a shocking video—captured on a cellphone—of employees of the Chinese Rural Commercial Bank lined up on a stage and spanked by their manager for not “exceeding themselves.” This was all done in front of their colleagues to publicly shame them for poor work performance.

Via Mashable:

The eight employees were each reprimanded by their manager and made to announce to their colleagues why they were underperforming. He then goes behind them and brutally smacks their bottoms with a large ruler.

After one round of spanking, the manager yells at them again before delivering another round of painful blows

.

Naturally, the video is coming under fire and demands for the unnamed worst manager of 2016 to be fired are something fierce. Good, this is outrageous! Imagine such a thing happening at Bank of America?

 
via reddit and Boing Boing

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

That well-known opening line from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between sits well with these Autochromes by artist and photographer Alfonse Van Besten (1865-1926) taken in the years leading up to the First World War. Looking at these beautiful idealized portraits of people working and playing in the tranquil Belgian countryside it is hard to imagine the bloody slaughter about to unfold on these “Flanders Fields.” They are like a glimpse of a man-made paradise before the Fall.

Van Besten was an early adopter of the Lumière brothers’ photographic process by which color was replicated through compressed pieces of dyed starch. His portraits are painterly—superbly composed and artfully created—with a sense of spectacle and drama. The majority of pictures show a wealthy middle and upper class at play—but as can be seen Van Besten was equally adept at capturing the working lives of the poor with a fine eye for detail and group composition.
 

The artist and photographer Alfonse Van Besten painting in his garden circa 1910.
 

‘Musing’—The photographer’s wife Josephine Arnz circa 1910.
 

Men in civic and military clothes, ca. 1911.
 

Children at play ca. 1912.
 
More Autochromes by Alfonse Van Besten, after the jump…

Frank Zappa ‘Stink-Foot’ illustration.
 
The strange French comic featured in this post based on Frank Zappa’s song “Stink-Foot” from his 1974 album, Apostrophe (’) was done by French illustrator Jean Solé back in 1975 when appeared in the French satire magazine Fluide Glacial in a special comic layout called Pop & Rock & Colegram.
 

An illustration from ‘Pop & Rock & Colegram’ riffing on the RCA Victor (among others) canine spokesperson ‘Nipper’ featuring Jean Solé, Gotlieb, and Alain Dister.
 
In the comics (that were published in Fluide Glacial from 1975-1978) by French illustrators Marcel Gotlieb (known as “Gotlib”) and Jean Solé the task was to create parody-style illustrations based on popular songs from bands like the Beatles, Roxy Music, Pink Floyd and in this case Solé‘s fantastic four-page take on Zappa’s “Stink-Foot.” Translated by renowned French music journalist Alain Dister, Solé‘s illustrations of Zappa’s jazzy six-minute jam about stinky feet is pretty spot on right down to an illustration of Zappa struggling to get his smelly python boots off. Here’s a samplings of the funky lyrics from “Stink-Foot:

You know
My python boot is too tight
I couldn’t get it off last night
A week went by
And now it’s July
I finally got it off
And my girlfriend cried, YOU GOT STINK-FOOT!
Stink-foot, darlin’

Your Stink-foot
Puts a hurt on my nose
Stink-foot, stink-foot, I ain’t lyin’
Can you rinse it off, do you suppose?

Though it’s rather difficult to find, the magazine has been reprinted since 1975 and if you dig what you are about to see, it’s well worth trying to track down.
 

 
More “Stink-Foot” after the jump…

 
I was recently blessed with the greatest piece of pop music gossip I had ever heard, who heard it from a friend of a friend (isn’t that always the source)? My friend heard from his friend’s friend that the folk singer turned pop singer Jewel (remember Jewel?) once played a show at a large college venue wherein staff were informed never to look her in the eye. This is—to my mind—the perfect piece of gossip because it 1.) centers around an obscure celebrity, 2.) is totally unverifiable, and 3.) highlights an unexpected eccentricity that is probably not true, but is nonetheless hilarious to imagine.

Picture it—Jewel—one of the original Lilith Fair performers—with her wholesome sweetness, her acoustic guitar and her trademark yodeling, leaves her hometown in rural Alaska, surviving for a while in extreme poverty—at one point even living in a van—only to become the sort of mega-diva that demands people not look her in the eye. It’s hilarious. And probably not true. The exact same story has been said about so many celebrities, it’s just funnier because Jewel, okay? (If you read this was something demanded by, say, Elton John or Julia Roberts, then it’s not funny at all is it?)

Bound by my love of dumb celebrity gossip, I felt obligated to share what is most certainly a completely fabricated story—I even offered the caveat, of course, that it’s probably not true because I’m a nice person—and this in turn encouraged others to come forward with their favorite celebrity rumors and stories. The best one though, via a friend of a friend (natch) on Facebook was a very thorough, very believable first person account by a former record store employee—and this one… well, I think that I am I’m inclined to believe. Remember The J.Geils Band? “Freeze Frame”? “Love Stinks”? “Musta Got Lost”? “Whammer-Jammer”? Or my personal favorite, “Centerfold”? The lead singer of The J. Geils Band was not J. Geils, it was Peter Wolf—who had a bit of a diva reputation in his day. What follows is an account I can neither confirm nor deny, but it’s a fantastically detailed story—make of it what you will.
 

 

Alright, here’s my Peter Wolf story.

So. Peter is a bit of a townie in Massachusetts and is pretty buddy-buddy with a lot of the local institutions. He‘s the kind of guy that walks into his regular haunts and expects to be noticed and applauded regardless of where he goes (as an aside, there’s a story that he went into Bukowski’s Tavern one time. Ordered six drinks, and on his tab he wrote “Peter Wolf” and signed it without leaving money).

So this being said, when he does something, he expect as much attention as possible on a local level. When he released one of his solo albums, I was working at a big record store in downtown Boston. and we were told that it was going to be huge. The reason being is because he was signed to a label at the time that had a partnership deal with our chain as opposed to Newbury Comics (a better independent store at the time, still better but less music-y and more merch driven). This means we got the deluxe edition of the album, posters, and the “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to do an in-store signing and performance with him.

Everyone that worked there was beyond excited (lie). So the main manager contacted his PR person and asked about an in-store. No big deal. right? Well…

Peter asked us to meet the following demands for the in-store:

1-We were to open an hour earlier than normal

2-We needed to play his new record throughout the day because he wanted to come in and “hear his work.”

3-We could only allow people to attend it they purchased the new CD and we gave them a wristband (something that at the time was last demanded by Billy Corgan who wouldn‘t even let the fucking staff members talk to him).

4-He wanted the back room to be catered

I saw the email and told my boss that it was absolutely ludicrous and that “we weren‘t even going to sell a dozen of these things.” He ignored me, and we decided to follow suit.

I was scheduled from open to close that day because I was good at handling in-stores and such, so I opened the location an hour early (6:00 AM in the middle of summer, mind you), strung posters all through the store, wrote up the wrist-bands and put on the record. Please note that he NEVER SAID WHEN HE WAS GOING TO SHOW UP.

Flash-forward to 3:45PM. One of the floor people says that Peter is in the store. And, by “Peter is in the store” he meant “Peter darted into the store and is now circumnavigating the entire store while going on his tip-toes to hear the album.” I rush downstairs to meet him and I am stopped by one of the floor people who was responsible for selling wristbands. I asked him how many we’ve sold (note: the album went on sale at the beginning of the week and we took little note-cards with receipt transaction number information so the people could come back for wristbands) and he said “Well today we sold three copies, and we’ve given away five wristbands total.” I am starting to panic at this point because his record label expected it to be the turnout of the century. So, right now I’m mustering up the courage to tell Peter WolI the truth (that he probably knew already) that his solo career wasn‘t cutting it.

As I am walking over to him one of the weird regulars we have saw him and sprinted in front of me. I froze. I didn’t know what he was going to say to him, but I was terrified regardless. The conversation went as follows:

Dude: HEY MAN! WHAT‘S GOING ON. I LOVE YOUR MUSIC. MAN!

Peter: Hey, thanks! That’s wicked nice of you. Do you like this one? (he says as he points to the ceiling).

Dude: Nah, man. That sounds like that asshole from J. Geils I hope this ain‘t the new Cars record!

The dude thought that Peter Wolf was Ric Ocasek from The Cars (for those that don’t know, The Cars are a Boston band too and Ric and Peter have a bit of a feud [further aside: Peter has gotten into fights with every mainstream Boston lead singer this side of Aerosmith] and the face Peter made was that of a man who just saw an atrocity. Without hesitation. l burst out laughing in the aisle and I tell the guy “Nah, dude, that‘s Mr. Peter Wolf!” To which the guy said “Jeez, I gave him too much credit, huh?” and walked away. Meanwhile. Peter is standing there in pure silence and as I walk up to him to introduce myself, he goes “Why the fuck do I bother, man?” I obviously have no idea what to say, so I throw my hands to my side and tell him there’s food in the back, and he says “Unless it’s my mother’s cookin‘. I think I’m going to the other fuckin’ store.”

It took an hour and a half to convince him to continue with the signing, and after all that was said and done (he signed like 100 posters for the other stores, and 12 people showed up for the actual in-store) he said “Well, I’d like to see the fuckin’ CARS do that shit” and walked out of the store without saying bye to anyone. As soon as he left. the manager looked at the staff and said “Okay, new rule. If any of you play anything Peter Wolf-related in this god-forsaken store, you’re fired.“

 
Oof. Brutal. But if you’re worried about Peter Wolf, don’t be. The guy managed to get his career together, and he’s still a working musician. His latest solo album even got some acclaim in Rolling Stone a few months ago! Congrats Peter, and thanks for the tunes!
 
More after the jump…