Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses is one of the most audacious and astounding feature films ever made, a visually-stunning hodgepodge of cutting edge 60s graphic design, Warholian underground cinema, documentary filmmaking along with wildly experimental editing techniques. Matsumoto’s dazzling freewheeling filmmaking breaks the Brechtian fourth wall several times—interviewing the actors about their roles and pulling a shot out to reveal the camera and lighting crew—and shows the influence of William Klein’s fashionista extravaganza Who Are You, Polly Magoo?, the films of Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, even Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
 

 
Funeral Parade of Roses is a furious and dizzying bombardment of violence, sex, and drugs. The 1969 film is well-known to have been a major influence on Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and we see this in the sped-up montage scenes set to classical music, the sound design and editing style, and art direction (not to mention the false-eyelashes and the phallic lollipops). It was produced via the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) the legendary Japanese production company and distributors of the country’s “New Wave” cinema that was shunned by the major studios. In one underground “in-joke” New York’s avant-garde cinema promoter Jonas Mekas is mentioned by name and quoted:

“All definitions of cinema have been erased. The doors are now open.”

 

 
All this and I’ve yet to mention that Funeral Parade of Roses takes place in Tokyo’s gay underworld—Bara no sôretsu is the original Japanese title, “bara” meaning “rose” which equates to the pejorative use of “pansy”—giving it a particularly edgy reputation for a film made in Japan in 1969.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
In 1959, painter Brion Gysin, a close friend and collaborator of William S. Burroughs, discovered a montage technique that produced what he called “cut-ups.”

What happened was, Gysin needed to cut some papers with a razor blade and so placed layers of newspapers on the table in order to avoid scratching up the surface. When he looked at the patterns he had accidentally created in the newspapers, he noticed that the sliced-up text and images offered interesting juxtapositions. He soon produced a book called Minutes to Go with Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and the South African poet Sinclair Beiles that employed the concept.

Burroughs pushed the cut-up idea further, speculating that the technique could reveal the “true” meaning of a given text and flirting wth the notion that cut-ups could yield key information about the future, saying, “When you cut into the present the future leaks out.”
 

Brion Gysin
 
Recently, David Dawson put up a sale (not an auction) on the Irish version of eBay featuring “a group of 5 photographs related to the Cut-Ups.” In 1982 Dawson co-founded, with Roger Ely and Genesis P-Orridge, the Final Academy celebration of Burroughs’ work held over several days in London and Manchester, which included appearances by Burroughs, Gysin, John Giorno, and others.

The prints come from negatives in the archive of Anthony Balch, who among other things once filmed Burroughs purchasing a parrot, which led to Genesis P-Orridge finding the discarded footage after Balch’s death and then editing it for the Final Academy event mentioned above.

The lot costs £125 (about $175).
 

 
More after the jump…

Image via Twitter

I’m sure you guys remember the Sweet Valley High book series from the 80s and 90s, right? Even if you were too old to read them, those SVH books were everywhere and the cover art was recognizable. They’re “totally 80s” iconic at this point, kind of like Patrick Nagel. Artist and illustrator, James L. Mathewuse—who’s also illustrated book covers for Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and Judy Blume novels—was behind the Sweet Valley High series cover art.

As one of the New York publishing houses’ popular illustrators, Mathewuse also became the sole artist who created over 250 covers for the “Sweet Valley High” and “Sweet Valley Twins” young adult romance series. Another young adult book, “Tiger Eyes” by Judy Blume, won the prestigious honors for “Best Young Adult Book of the Year.” The young adult series that Jimmy painted have been recognized as the largest selling, not only in America, but in the world.

If you’ve ever dreamt of having your mug immortalized as a Sweet Valley High character… now is your chance. James L. Mathewuse takes commissions! OMG.

According to his website, portraits start at $200 and you can contact him for a consultation. I just might take him up on this!

Click here to visit his page.

Below, examples of Mathewuse’s work:

 

 
via Boing Boing and Your Tango

 
Salvador Dali loved the Marx Brothers. He loved their madcap, anarchic comedy. In particular Dali loved Harpo Marx—the blonde corkscrew-haired comic mime whose visual comedy—unlike the quick witty repartee of his brother Groucho—was universal and needed no translation. Dali described Harpo as one of America’s three great Surrealists—the other two being Walt Disney and Cecil B. DeMille.

The pair first met at a party in Paris in 1936. Harpo told Dali how much he liked his paintings. Dali told Harpo how much he loved his films—in particular Animal Crackers which he described as “the summit of the evolution of comic cinema.” Dali gushed over Harpo’s performance where he pulled fish and cutlery from his pocket and shot the hats of beautiful women—this was true Surrealism!

Understandably, the two men became friends.

Dali later wrote “an entertaining, if rather implausible account” of his meeting with Harpo for Harper’s Bazaar in 1937:

I met Harpo for the first time in his garden. He was naked, crowned with roses, and in the center of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least five hundred harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp. An almost springlike breeze drew a curious murmur from the harp forest. In Harpo’s pupils glows the same spectral light to be observed in Picasso’s.

When Harpo returned to America, Dali sent him a harp wrapped in cellophane with barbed wire for strings and spoons, knives and forks glued all over its frame. In return Harpo sent Dali a photograph of himself playing the harp with bandaged fingers. He invited Dali to Hollywood saying he’d be more than happy to pose for the great artist—if he cared to smear paint all over him. Dali was delighted to take up the offer. In 1937, he arrived in Hollywood with his wife Gala. He visited Harpo and sketched him playing his barbed wire harp with a lobster on his head. Natch.
 

Dali’s sketch of Harpo playing the harp.
 
Dali brought Harpo a gift—a movie script he wanted the Marx Brothers to make. The script was called Giraffes on Horseback Salads or The Surrealist Woman. It was a series of unconnected scenes typed in blue ribbon over twenty-two pages with various notes written in ink. Dali had already made two infamous films with his friend the director Luis Buñuel—Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or. Now he wanted to cast Harpo and cinema’s “greatest Surrealist act” the Marx Brothers in a film that just might revolutionize Hollywood—or maybe not...

Read Dali’s script and see his sketches for ‘Giraffes on Horseback Salads,’ after the jump…

Peter Pontiac’s illustration from Muziek Expres of Lou Reed. The small caption on the bottom right reads ‘Junkies Ain’t funky!’
 
Muziek Expres was an edgy and super popular Dutch music magazine that got its start back in the mid-50s. In addition to the regular kind of music magazine features like interviews with musicians and bands, the coveted fold-out posters and song lyrics, the magazine also showcased early glammy-looking illustrations done by a legendary Dutch illustrator called “Peter Pontiac.”
 

David Bowie.
 
Born Peter J. G. Pollmann in the North Holland province of Beverwijk in 1951, Pollmann changed his name to “Pontiac” sometime in the 1960’s after meeting up with a group of creative type dropouts whose pastimes consisted of the ever popular trifecta of sex, dope, and rock and roll. During his time with these ne’er-do-well nomads, Pontiac (who had no formal training as an artist) was illustrating the covers of illegal songbooks for acts like Lou Reed and the Rollings Stones. Pontiac’s style came from his love of underground comics, especially the works of cartoonist and folk hero, R. Crumb.

Somewhere along the way, Pontiac’s artwork caught the eye of Rolling Stone bringing Pontiac notoriety on his home turf which led to his work being showcased in publications all over Holland, Spain, and the United States. In 1990, Pontiac launched his own comic zine, the Pontiac Review that would have a fourteen-year run. In 2000 Pontiac published what many residents of the Netherlands consider to be one of the greatest graphic novels to come out of their country, Kraut in which Pontiac relays the eerie story of his father, Joop Pollmann, a volunteer war correspondent for the SS during the Second World War who mysteriously disappeared while sailing off the coast of Curaçao. 

In an interviewconducted not long before his death in 2015 from liver disease, Pontiac expressed remores when it came to his heroin days saying that if he could, that he would do things “differently” and referred to himself as a “victim of Lou Reed.” There are a few sources online if you’d like to own some of Pontiacs work, including the hard-to-track-down award-winning book Rhythm. Pontiac’s rock-star-studded illustrations from Muziek Expres follow after the jump. Some are mildly NSFW.
 

Freddie Mercury.
 

via Vinyl Maniac
 
When this appeared in my Facebook feed, it took me a moment to realize it was a fake. It went down like this: first, I felt real regret that I’d missed the ceremony on Hollywood Boulevard, with Lux, Ivy, other stars of stage and screen, and Mayor of Hollywood Johnny Grant; then I remembered that Lux and Johnny Grant are both dead, and have been so for a while now; and then I read the photo caption and realized I’d “been took.”

The proprietor of the French record store Vinyl Maniac takes credit for faking the long-overdue tribute to the Cramps on his Facebook page, writing:

Depuis ce soir, il y a une étoile pour The Cramps sur le Walk of Fame d’Hollywood !!! C’est mon hommage au meilleur groupe de Rock !

(Translation: “After tonight, there’s a star for the Cramps on the Hollywood Walk of Fame!!! It’s my tribute to the best groupe de Rock!”)

Eyewitnesses say the ersatz plaque—a vinyl application stuck on one of the blank stars in the pavement—is located in front of the Bed Bath & Beyond on Vine. Go there and make your offerings now, before the Man sandblasts it clean to award Wayne Newton an emergency second star. Oooh, wouldn’t that be just like the Man?

More after the jump…

 
Since 1982, the ZBS Foundation (ZBS= “Zero Bullshit”) has been producing a sci-fi/detective hybrid radio drama called Ruby, the ongoing adventures of Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe. The show is a fun listen, and since its history is documented elsewhere, we shan’t dwell on it here, as the series itself doesn’t concern us so much as does a pair of its supporting characters: The Android Sisters.

Exactly like it says on the box, the Android Sisters are robotic “siblings”—conceit and name both lifted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—whose role in the show is to deliver pointedly satiric songs, rendered in a unison speak-sing intonation by actresses Ruth Maleczech (sometimes credited as “Breuer”—married name?) and Valaria Wasilewski. Though it’s a pretty one-dimensional schtick, their acutely ‘80s synth songs were sufficiently listenable to merit an album in 1984. Released on the typically more rootsy Vanguard label (it was the home of Joan Baez and Buddy Guy, among others), Songs of Electronic Despair contained eleven goofy examples of what people in the ‘80s thought the future sounded like, and many of the songs directly address the themes of mechanization and alienation with which a lot of the synth musicians of the era seemed obsessed. Really, much of this stuff is in the same zone as the work Laurie Anderson was up to back then—and Anderson was once an artist in residence at the ZBS Foundation.
 
More after the jump…

 
I’ve heard some great stories about the David Cronenberg movies that almost were. Indeed, I once heard Cronenberg himself tell the tale of taking a phone call from the office of George Lucas, who wanted to feel the Toronto-born director out on the subject of directing Return of the Jedi. Cronenberg sniffed that he didn’t really direct material written by other people, and that was the end of that. (The conversation is all the more ironic if you consider that since that moment, Cronenberg has directed material originated by William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Don DeLillo, among others. Maybe he just didn’t think of Lucas as a writer on that level?)

Cronenberg also turned down a chance to direct Top Gun, finding it too jingoistic (plus, as a Canadian, Cronenberg doubly wasn’t into it).

What I didn’t know until recently is that Cronenberg was the first director to be considered to direct Total Recall, which was eventually directed (rather well) by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, previously responsible for Robocop.

Interestingly, Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon had tried to develop Philp K. Dick’s story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” as a script in the 1970s before concluding that the special effects would be too costly—their next project would become Alien, the commercial success of which kick-started the orignal PKD project again. 

Cronenberg worked on pre-production for the PKD project for about a year, a process that generated the fascinating concept art seen below. His choice for the lead role was to have been William Hurt, a far cry from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, er, likely less thoughtful approach to the movie. After Cronenberg’s labors, the producers told him that they admired his treatment but were hoping for something a little bit closer to “Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars,” so Cronenberg returned to a project that would have a tone that interested him much more, that being a remake of the 1958 sci-fi classic The Fly.

Purportedly, Cronenberg’s take on the material would have been lot closer to Dick’s original story than the Verhoeven movie.

The artworks here were created by Ron Miller and his wife Judith Miller, who was responsible for the 3-D models, as well as production designer Pierluigi Basile.
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....
 

 
This is one of those clever ideas that make me want to kick myself for not thinking of it first... Anyway, Firebox is selling a face-melting Major Arnold Toht candle (the sinister SS agent whose face melts off at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark).

According to UK-based Firebox, “Thankfully it melts a lot slower than his face does in the film.”

Doesn’t emit a blood-curdling screech as it burns

Perhaps a good Father’s Day gift if your dad’s a fan of the film? It’s $28.39 + shipping. 

CSNY painted by Guy Peellaert in ‘Rock Dreams’
 
Although Neil Young apparently hated doing TV shows—one of the main reasons he supposedly left the Buffalo Springfield in 1967 was not wanting to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson—by 1969 Young had given a bit on this front, as he agreed to appear along with David Crosby, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills on the This is Tom Jones TV show. CSNY did a short “You Don’t Have To Cry” and then the Welsh belter joined them, as was the custom on his program.

From Jimmy McDonough’s Young bio, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography:

September 6 also brought a surreal appearance on the This Is Tom Jones variety show, featuring Jones himself bellowing lead vocal on Crosby’s “Long Time Gone.”

“It was highly rated, sold a lotta records, but in retrospect it was embarrassing, just a bad call’, said Elliot Roberts. ‘Neil went, ‘The Tom Jones show! What possessed you? It’s that shit.’ He always used to say ‘that shit’. Crosby had this weed of doom… Neil never forgave me for that. He ripped me about it for a very, very long time. Years.’”

 

 
Given that nearly five decades have passed since this was taped, it’s actually pretty amazing. Nothing to be ashamed of, certainly. Tom Jones and his show might’ve been seen as somewhat “square” by the rockstar standards of CSNY—Nash would’ve been acquainted with the Welsh singer from his days in the Hollies, no doubt—but the man’s mighty lungs inspire the rest of them to keep up, it must be said. I love how (an obviously manic) Stephen Stills rises to the occasion with his, er, intense vocal contribution near the end. Bassist Greg Reeves might’ve only been fifteen years old when this was shot—look at how skinny he was—and that’s Dallas Taylor on drums. You’ll note how the expression on Young’s face goes from one of disdain/‘What am I doing here?” to “This fucking rocks” about halfway through. The goofy expression on Croz’s mug needs no further explanation.
 
More after the jump…