These fascinating playing cards are the work of a Slovenian artist named Boris Kobe who was held by the Nazis as a political prisoner in Allach, which was a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Kobe lived to see the end of the war, and was a very successful architect in his native Slovenia afterwards; he died well into his seventies in 1981. His most prominent project after the war was probably the restoration of the Ljubljana Castle with Jože Plečnik.

As I see it, it’s a little unclear when and where these cards were made. Sources uniformly describe them as having been made “at Allach”—yet at least one of them appears to have been made after the Allied liberation of the camp, and it’s difficult to imaging Kobe hanging around the camp for very long after that. Certainly there wasn’t weeks of clandestine card games going on after that crucial moment. It’s difficult to tell, but there might be a little rhetorical sleight of hand going on there.

Whatever the case, the cards are simply remarkable. First, they look pretty great; Kobe was a gifted caricaturist, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be gained simply from looking at them. But most importantly, they show a life at Dachau close-up in the frankest terms. The cards depict inmates and guards alike, although most of the figures depicted are inmates forced to do back-breaking work, crowded into bunk beds,  disrobing en masse, and, of course, as a pile of skeletons. The king of clubs is depicted as a skeleton.

As I mentioned, these cards were almost certainly created after the liberation of Allach on April 22, 1945 by the 42nd Rainbow Division of the U.S. Army. How do we know this? It’s apparently depicted in one of the cards: Card XXI seems to show liberation, the Slovenian flag, and a tombstone-like image marked “Allach” that is being consumed by flames.

The cards are intended for a game variously called Tarock/Tarot, but the word tarot here is likely to be misleading to English-speaking audiences. Tarock/Tarot is a trick-based game like spades or gin that was popular in the Habsburg Empire and Europe generally for centuries. So this is not a tarot deck in the occult sense as we would think of it; that should be obvious from a glance at the cards, which lack characters like The Fool, The Magician, The Hanged Man, The Sun, and so on. To their creator Kobe and whomever else originally used them, it was just a regular deck of playing cards. I have family in Austria and on my visits there we would sometimes play a related game called “Schnapsen” which didn’t require four players and used a restricted deck, I think the cards only went down as far as the eight card. Basically a game of Schnapsen there was equivalent to the way dominoes is played in a lot of places, you’d play it aimlessly and shoot the shit and gossip.

See the complete deck at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies website hosted by the University of Minnesota. The original deck is at the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
More of these amazing cards after the jump….
 

 
Question: What creates a ghost town? Answer: Rapid population, rapid depopulation. Ghost towns are the residue of booms and busts, expectations of substantial monetary gain that for whatever reason failed to materialize. Wherever resources can be exploited and depleted, there you will find, at some point, ghost towns. In the United States we have ghost towns where the Gold Rush happened, where railroads or interstate highways suddenly diverted opportunities elsewhere.

The modern story of Africa is largely one of exploitation at the hands of the European powers, so it’s probably not surprising that they have ghost towns there, too. One of the most remarkable exists in Namibia. It’s called Kolmanskop; the Germans who created settlements to mine the diamonds there called it “Kolmanskuppe.”
 

 
The 1910s were a big decade for Kolmanskop: the Germans created a veritable German Gesellschaft there, complete with a hospital, a ballroom, a power station, a school, a theater, even an ice factory, no small luxury in balmy Namibia. World War I put an end to all that; the town crept along until 1954 before becoming abandoned for good.

At that point, the sands started to take over the town and those sands are transforming Kolmanskop into a haunting, beautiful artifact.

French photographer Romain Veillon has a jaw-dropping series of photographs of Kolmanskop called “Les Sables Du Temps”—“The Sands of Time.” The title is a cliché, of course, but something about the material demands a cliché of that sort. In addition to whatever fleeting political point they evoke, the images are really about man’s transience in the face of implacable nature. 

Veillon is hardly the first artist to discover the aesthetic possibilities of Kolmanskop. Richard Stanley’s 1993 horror movie Dust Devil was partially filmed there, as well as parts of Ron Fricke’s non-narrative 2011 movie Samsara.

You can see more of these images at Veillon’s website.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via The Fox Is Black

 
Another mark in the “why the Internet rules” column: an Oklahoma college student named Amelia has transcribed the music written on the ass of a figure from the “Hell” panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, and posted a recording of it to her Tumblr.

Listen to it here.

It’s not the most mind-blowing music you’ll hear in your life, I know, but it’s still wonderful that this was done.
 

There it is. Wonder why it took five centuries before someone played it?

Music geeks may have noticed that the staff on the man’s butt (must resist obvious joke) has only four lines. It seems likely that this is an older form of notation used for Gregorian chants.

If you’ll indulge a nitpick—on her blog, Amelia calls this “LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell.” Given that most sources hold that the triptych’s completion date was around the year 1500, give or take, it’s much, much closer to about 500 years old. But an error like that is easy enough to ascribe to a slip of the typing finger.

If you’re curious to know more about the Bosch painting, it can be viewed at The Prado. If you don’t live in Madrid and your travel budget isn’t so indulgent, this episode of the fine BBC documentary series Renaissance Revolution covers it in fascinating depth.
 

 
Many thanks to Rob Galo for bringing this to my attention.

 
Lovely vintage Japanese James Bond posters.
 



 



 



 

More posters after the jump…

 
NYC-based British illustrator Jon Burgerman has blogged a darkly hilarious series of digitally altered photos titled “Head Shots,” which depict him being murdered by movie and TV posters in the NYC Subway system, in an effort to call attention to the pervasiveness of violence in culture and entertainment. Via The Fox Is Black:

Jon describes the work as “interventions staged in public” and each image features a violent advertisement found in the New York subway. I’m particularly impressed by how simple and effective these images are at highlighting the violence that exists in ads. Most of us pass these types of images everyday and yet we never stop to notice just how violent they can be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Hervé Villechaize, famous to all Americans during the 1970s and 1980s as a malevolent twerp in The Man with the Golden Gun and most particularly as “Tattoo” on the long-running ABC television series Fantasy Island, was a pretty interesting dude. His thick French accent and vaguely exotic countenance suggested a pint-sized “Most Interesting Man in the World” type years before the Dos Equis ad campaign. The truth wasn’t that far off: despite the physical handicap of “proportionate” dwarfism, Villechaize studied art at the Beaux-Arts school in Paris and had a successful exhibition after his graduation. He moved to Manhattan in 1964 and worked as an artist, painter and photographer. He acted in a Sam Shepard play, in Oliver Stone’s directorial debut Seizure, in Conrad Rook’s Chappaqua (with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg), and (much later) in Richard Elfman’s delirious avant-garde cult movie Forbidden Zone.

Villechaize was infamous for constantly macking on his female co-workers, and he dated his fellow Forbidden Zone actor Susan Tyrrell, who told Michael Musto in 1983, “Herve’s a brilliant man, hilarious sense of humor, who’s very paranoid. He carried a gun and a long knife all the time. I loved him very much. You ask any woman he’s been with—he’s a very sexual man. He knows what to do!”

Sadly, Hervé Villechaize took his own life in 1993.

Incredibly, another woman in his life was Greta Garbo. In late 2012 a painting went up for auction with the following description:
 

An acrylic on panel painting of white and yellow flowers on a green background, with three embedded circular mirrors. Signed lower left “Hervé Villechaize.” Given by the actor to Greta Garbo as a gift.

 
Here is that painting:
 

 
Not many people know that Garbo herself tried her hand at painting as well. In the same auction, these two canvases by Garbo went up for sale:
 

 

 

 
Rolland “Rolly” Crump is a Disney legend. Originally working as an assistant animator under Uncle Walt himself in the early 1950s, Crump performed “in betweener” work on Disney classics like Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmations, and Sleeping Beauty.

In 1959 Crump joined Walt Disney Imagineering, becoming one of Walt Disney’s key designers for Disneyland. He worked on the Haunted Mansion, the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Adventureland Bazaar. Crump served as key designer on the Disney pavilions featured at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, including “It’s A Small World.” When that attraction was given a permanent home at Disneyland, Crump added the iconic puppet children clock at the entrance. He was also one of the lead designers on a Disneyland attraction that was shelved after Disney’s death, The Museum of The Weird.

During his long and illustrious career, Crump contributed to the designs for Walt Disney World, Busch Gardens and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus World, before returning to Disney to project design “The Land” and “Wonders of Life” pavilions at EPCOT Center. Now 83 and still going strong, in 2004 Crump was given a Disney Legends Award.

Back in 1960, Rolly Crump made a series of whimsical and delightful posters depicting Beatniks and their predilection for drugs. Made for poster pioneer Howard Morseburg’s Esoteric Poster Company, Crump worked for Morseburg until 1964, also turning out posters satirizing Communism, Cuba and the Soviet Union.
 

 

 

 

 
 
Thank you Taylor Jessen!

 
How best to describe Peter Boyd MacLean’s film Lummox about the artist Millree Hughes?

Well, firstly, it’s not your typical heads-and-clips, or long interview with the artist as saint, no. Rather like the best of Peter Boyd MacLean’s work it critiques and re-invents the form of the documentary as something startling, new. and exciting

It’s a bit like having a conversation with a smart kid, who makes you reassess exactly what you think you know.

For example, one day I was accompanying my friend’s five-year-old daughter home from school, and in the silvery twilight of a spring evening, we were talking about how far we could see. “I can see the houses at the end of the road,” my wee pal said. “I can see the trees in the gardens beyond them,” I replied. “I can see the tower blocks away in the distance,” she said. “I can see the hills away over at the horizon.” “How far is that?” “I dunno, several miles away, I guess.” “I can see further than that,” wee McDoodler said. “I can see thousands of miles further than that.” “Really? You can’t see that far.” “Yes, I can. I can see the stars.”

Boyd MacLean can certainly see the stars.

I’m probably biased as I’ve known Peter for quite a while—since not longer after he made his name as part of the Duvet Brothers, producing award-wining scratch videos for the likes of “Pump Up The Volume.” Since then, he’s been making television series and documentaries, all of which bear his distinctive creative style as a film-maker.

Lummox is a collaborative documentary with New York-based Abstract artist Millree Hughes. It follows Hughes’ disillusionment with his lenticular Abstract work, and his desire to include a figure within his dynamic landscapes. (Sadly, the film only gives a slight idea of how truly beautiful Hughes’ work is.) The film also questions the role of the film-maker, asking how much of a documentary is the story of its subject rather than the film’s creator. Boyd MacLean builds Lummox to an emotionally powerful, yet chaotic, entertaining and bizarre “Glam Roque” finale.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
‘1-2 FU’: A personal odyssey through British Punk Rock

Mark Mothersbaugh, “Love Is For the Birds, Baby!”
 
Mark Mothersbaugh’s work in DEVO (not that he did it alone) has often seemed like an extension of pop art into the commercial realm. DEVO’s “exhibitons” were albums, their “retrospectives” were compilations, and for a while there, their “museum” was effectively MTV. Pop Art 2.0, let’s call it: every bit of cover art or promotional gimcrackery seemed like a new Roy Lichtenstein with a political edge, as befitted a bunch of arty freethinkers from the cultural wilderness (or is it?) of northern Ohio. DEVO famously had a concept, and they fleshed it out with all manner of bold, cartoonish (yet strangely disturbed) pop paraphernalia.

Thus it’s no surprise that Mothersbaugh, at least, has been spending his free time churning out all manner of “paintings, prints, photography, rugs, sculpture and odd inventions like an instrument that plays bird calls” including “30,000 informal, post-card sized drawings that Mothersbaugh, 63, produced during decades of obsessive, mostly private, art-making.”
 

Mark Mothersbaugh, “1932 Matchmaking Stats, Pt. 1”
 

Mark Mothersbaugh, “Robot Loses His Head”
 
It sounds like Adam Lerner, curator of the upcoming show “Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver has his work cut out for him. Fortunately the show will cover all three floors of the MCA. “A lot of these things, it will be the first time any human other than me ever looked at it,” Mothersbaugh said.

The dates for the exhibition are October 31, 2014 to February 15, 2015. If you happen not to live in the Mountain Time Zone, fear not: six prominent museums have already booked the show after its time in Denver.
 
DEVO, “Post Post-Modern Man”:

 
“WB Mobile Art Spew Gallery featuring Mark Mothersbaugh”:

 
Via the fantastic So Bad So Good blog comes word of the talented lad Yung Lenox, who at age 7 is filling his Instagram account with his own re-creations of classic hip hop album art, with some punk and metal in the mix as well. Now, I’ve never known a kid who didn’t love to draw, but this kid shows some promise a bit beyond his years. He’s also admirably prolific, and enterprising to boot—he has an online store where he’s selling prints of his work. There’s little else I could add but to question whether he’s even allowed to listen to any of these, but since that does little to illuminate the actual work, let’s just have a look at the images.
 

Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
 

Ice Cube, Amerikkkas Most Wanted
 

Dr. Octagon, Dr Octagonecologyst
 

2Pac, All Eyez on Me
 

A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory
 

Slayer, Live: Decade of Aggression
 

Minor Threat, Minor Threat
 

2 Live Crew, As Nasty As They Wanna Be