Fans of Japanese graphic design, rejoice: René Walter, of Germany’s Nerdcore website, has amassed an amazing collection of vintage Japanese advertisements on Flickr. He’s certainly found a lot gems.

Here’s a taste of René‘s Vintage Japanese Advertising (Misc).
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Alice Cooper performs “Black Juju” during the Midsummer Rock Festival on June 13, 1970 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Cooper claims Pink Floyd as an early influence on his music and it certainly can be seen in this video, which has never been officially released on VHS or DVD.

At the 4 minute mark watch as Cooper gets hit by an upside-down pineapple cake.
 

 
A rather rotund rendition of Tony the Tiger by Ron English. Inspired by his cereal box hack, Fat Tony will be making appearances at local toy stores soon. You can pre-order one at Big Bad Toy Store.

Fat Tony will be sold in limited quantities.
 

 
Via Laughing Squid

 
Leonard Cohen’s new album Old Ideas is being released next Tuesday. The critical reception has been ecstatic. Which thrills me because I have loved Cohen from the moment I heard “Suzanne” when I was 15 years old. He’s been a massive influence on my own music. My debt to him is deep.

Here’s something to hold you Cohen fans over until Old Ideas release: a brilliant performance by Mr. Cohen on Austin City Limits from 1988.
 

 
Here’s something quite lovely, a tour inside of Salvador Dali’s Spanish home.

Open Culture provides some history and description:

Along the Costa Brava in northern Spain, in the little seaside village of Port Lligat, sits the house that became Salvador Dalí’s main residence in 1930. It started off as a small fisherman’s hut. Then Dalí went to work on the structure, renovating it little by little over the next 40 years, creating a living, breathing, labyrinthine home that reflects the artist’s one-of-a-kind aesthetic. Writing about the house, the author Joseph Pla once said:

   The decoration of the house is surprising, extraordinary. Perhaps the most exact adjective would be: never-before-seen. I do not believe that there is anything like it, in this country or in any other…. Dalí’s house is completely unexpected…. It contains nothing more than memories, obsessions. The fixed ideas of its owners. There is nothing traditional, nor inherited, nor repeated, nor copied here. All is indecipherable personal mythology…. There are art works (by the painter), Russian things (of Mrs. Gala), stuffed animals, staircases of geological walls going up and down, books (strange for such people), the commonplace and the refined, etc.

For many, it’s a long trip to Portlligat, and only eight people can visit the house at a time. So today we’re featuring a video tour of Dalí’s Spanish home. The interior shots begin around the 1:30 mark. If you love taxidermy, you won’t be wasting your time.

Nicely photographed. But I find the music a bit distracting.
 

 
Glitterbug was Derek Jarman’s final film, compiled from the many hours of Super 8 footage he had shot throughout his life. Originally made in 1994 for the BBC’s Arena. arts strand, Glitterbug is a visual journal that ties together aspects of Jarman’s life from the 1970s to 1990s.

The film opens with the artist awakened by the memory of dreams, of lovers, of friends, of place - Jarman’s lofts on Bankside, Upper Ground, the Thames River; of self, shaving, washing, breakfasting - those small rituals that prepare the day, the structuring of artifice and order. The world outside, My Tea Shop, the day-time existence, Jarman’s curiosity for the world around him. Then at night another world, we see preparation for Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World, returning to day, a garden party, is this Andrew Logan singing as Little Nell Campbell dances? Duggie Fields watches, Jarman films.

The dreamer sleeps, travels to the country, Van Gogh fields, standing stones, the memory of place, absence of others, a white-washed cottage room, the creation of art, the structuring of order.

The dreamer awake, and we are now watching Jarman at work, Sebastiane, the sea flecked gold, the actors at play, legs entwined. An office, an apartment, ‘phone calls, then filming the artist Duggie Fields, his designs, his face, a prelude to Jubilee, a young flame-haired Toyah Willcox, The Sex Pistols, Jordan and a dress rehearsal for what will become The Last of England, as she pirouettes around a burning Union Jack, Adam Ant, hair-cutting, the Silver Jubilee.

Jarman is showing us the sketches for preparation, the themes he returned to throughout his life. Rome, ritual, the research for Caravaggio, punk, the art of mirrors, The Slits, William Burroughs, Gensis P. Orridge, Throbbing Gristle, Jarman’s fascinations and obsessions, his idols and co-conspirators. The ritual of sharing tea, sharing cigarettes, a shared communion, youthful faces, sun flecked, smiling in the sun, a future ahead, too often cut short by the frost, this the last summer they danced on the rooftop,  ‘Here I am, here are my secrets,’ he is saying, as we plunder through his film diaries, Super 8 scrapbook, glittering trinket chest, memory is what makes us, what sometimes betrays us, what gives us the love we have to share, returning to the Thames, the friends, the lovers, those living, those dead.

Glitterbug Derek Jarman’s Super 8 films, with Andrew Logan, Duggie Fields, Tilda Swinton, Michael Clark, Adam Ant, Toyah Willcox, William Burroughs and Genesis P. Orridge. Music by Brian Eno, specially commissioned for this film.
 

 
Tonight in New York, revered graphic designer Milton Glaser (do a Google Images search if that name doesn’t ring a bell) will take part in a panel discussion with Mirko Ilic about the creation of powerful politically driven graphics. The event is hosted by Reality Sandwich creative director, Michael Robinson

This panel discussion features graphic design legend Milton Glaser and award winning designer/illustrator Mirko Ilic focusing on graphic design’s ability to convey how power is effectively used and distributed, and justice is fulfilled. Based upon Glaser and Mirko’s book The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics, the authors will discuss how today’s image makers and corporate shamans can use design to create the more beautiful and just world we all know is possible.

This event is co-sponsored with Evolver/Reality Sandwich. Hopefully they’ll put a videotape of the discussion online soon.

Thursday, January 26, 8–10pm at The Open Center, 22 E. 30th St., NY

Below, a delightful portrait of Milton Glaser by Hillman Curtis:
 

 
Milton Glaser’s Graphic Influence: 14 Iconic Images (Fast Company)

 
“Hidden Mother” was a 19th century portrait trend where mothers, who were basically dressed a “ghost,” would hold their young children still while being photographed. The end result was, well… haunting and creepy.

There’s a whole Flickr group pool dedicated to the “Hidden Mother” era.
 

 
More after the jump…

”It was like some crazy-art world marriage and they were the odd couple. The relationship was symbiotic. Jean-Michel thought he needed Andy’s fame, and Andy thought he needed Jean-Michel’s new blood. Jean Michel gave Andy a rebellious image again.”

—Warhol’s longtime studio assistant Ronny Cutrone quoted in Warhol: The Biography by Victor Bockris,

 

 
German art dealer Bruno Bischofberger explains how the collaboration came to happen and his own role in setting it up:

In the autumn of 1982 I brought Jean-Michel to Andy Warhol in the Factory and this is how they really got to know each other. I had a firm agreement with Warhol that I could propose younger artists which I found interesting for an article in Interview Magazine, which we had founded together in 1969. Warhol also let me decide which young artists I could bring with me to the Factory to have a portrait done, in exchange for which they could swap one of their works. Warhol trusted my judgement and it was of no consequence that the works that he received in exchange were often worth much less than his portraits. In this way Andy established a relationship with the generation of younger artists. When I told him that I would bring Jean-Michel Basquiat for a portrait session and the usual buffet lunch at the Factory on Union Square the next day he seemed rather surprised and asked me„ Do you really think that Basquiat is such an important artist?“ Warhol was not familiar with Basquiat‘s new work and told me that he remembered having met the artist on one or two occasions, on both of which Warhol had felt him to be too forward. Basquiat had been trying to get to know Warhol and had offered him his street sale art, small drawings on paper that Warhol had been very sceptical of.

Warhol photographed Basquiat with his special Polaroid portrait camera. Jean-Michel asked Warhol whether he could also take a photo of him, took some shots and then asked me to take some photos of him and Warhol together. We then wanted to go next door to have the customary cold buffet lunch. Basquiat did not want to stay and said goodbye. We had hardly finished lunch, one, at most one and half an hour later, when Basquiat‘s assistant appeared with a 150 x 150 cm (60 x 60“) work on canvas, still completely wet, a double portrait depicting Warhol and Basquiat: Andy on the left in his typical pose resting his chin on his hand, and Basquiat on the right with the wild hair that he had at the time. The painting was titled Dos Cabezas. The assistant had run the ten to fifteen blocks from Basquiat‘s studio on Crosby Street to the Factory on Union Square with the painting in his hands because it wouldn‘t fit into a taxi.

All visitors and employees at the Factory flocked around to see the painting, which was admired by all. Most astonished of all was Andy who said: “I‘m really jealous - he is faster than me.“ Soon thereafter Warhol made a portrait of Basquiat on several equally large canvases: Basquiat sporting his wild hairdo, silkscreened on the background of the “oxidation“ type, the same as the Oxidation or Piss Paintings of 1978. Basquiat subsequently painted another two portraits of Warhol. One in 1984 entitled Brown Spots, which depicts Andy as a banana, and the other in 1984-85 which shows Warhol with glasses and large white wig working out with a barbell in each hand.

Basquiat and I soon started to speak of Francesco Clemente as the third artist for the collaborations project and we decided together to invite him to join in, after having pondered Julian Schnabel as an alternative. First, of course, we wanted to know whether Warhol would agree to do the project.

Jean-Michel knew and respected Clemente, whose studio was only two blocks away from Jean-Michels. In the following years he became great friends with him and his wife Alba. He also knew Schnabel well, and for quite some time, and was very impressed by his work and his success. Basquiat decided not to approach Schnabel with the collaboration project because, as he explained to me, he felt that an artist like Schnabel, with his strong, dominating personality, could not have prevented himself from influencing or commenting upon the work of the other collaborating artists. Basquiat, as a black in New York, was over-sensitive to other artist‘s comments on his work. He told me that he was once insulted, in my opinion wrongly, when Schnabel, as a response to the question how he found a work of Basquiats which both were looking at, gave what Basquiat considered to be a too critical answer, but which was surely meant by Julian to be no more than a constructive suggestion.

Clemente had, in the summer of 1983, painted a group of twelve large paintings in Skowhegan, Maine, which I was able to purchase from him and which are also a sort of collaboration. He stretched fragments of painted theatre backdrops made of cloth on stretchers and added his own inventions to those already there. Schnabel had also, early on his career, painted on surfaces that had a clearly defined structure, in a sort of collaboration. In 1986 he painted a series of Japanese Kabuki theatre backdrops, and Enzo Cucchi also painted on four Italian theatre backdrops in 1987.

To get the most spontaneous work into the collaborations I suggested to Basquiat that every artist should, without conferring with the others about iconography, style, size, technique, etc., independently start the paintings, of course in the knowledge that two further artists would be working on the same canvas, and that enough mental and physical space should be left to accommodate them. I further suggested to him that each artist send one half of the started collaborations to each of the other artists and the works then be passed on to the remaining artist whose work was still missing. Basquiat liked my proposal and agreed.

Read more at Bruno Bischofberger.com
 

 

 
Above, Warhol rendered as banana in Basquait’s “Brown Spots,” 1984.
 
I was actually at the opening of their collaboration at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1985. It was a great party. I was nineteen and thrilled to be there.

An interview with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, from the UK documentary series, State of the Art.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Long Lost Footage of Musical Play by John Phillips, Produced by Andy Warhol (1975)

 
World renowned Greek director Theo Angelopoulos has died.

Award winning Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos has been killed in a road accident in Athens.

The 76-year-old sustained serious head injuries after he was hit by a motorcycle while crossing a road in the Greek capital.

The motorcyclist, an off duty police officer, was also injured in the collision.

The director was hard at work on his latest film “The Other Sea” when he died.

Born in Athens in 1935 his career spanned some 40 years he won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for “Ulysees’ Gaze” in 1995 and three years later picked up the Palme d ‘Or for “Eternity and a Day.”

His themes in the main dealt with Greece’s recent history exile, immigration and war, he said last year that he wanted the Greek financial crisis to be the theme of his next movie.

Angelopoulos’ films featured some of cinema’s great actors, including Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz and Jeanne Moreau. His films are deliberately paced, visually rich and demanding. You either succumb to their dream-like atmosphere filled with symbolism and long stretches of silence or go mad trying. I’ve always struggled with his films but have been greatly rewarded for my patience.

Below is Ulysses’ Gaze in its entirety. Enjoy the journey.

Winner of the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, this drama centers on the Balkan conflict as viewed through the eyes of a filmmaker named A (Harvey Keitel). Director Theo Angelopoulos wrote the screenplay, drawing from personal experiences. A is a Greek émigré director who returns to his homeland after 35 years in the U.S., ostensibly to screen his latest film, which is so controversial that it attracts religious protests. In fact, A’s real purpose is to search for three reels of undeveloped film that may be the first ever shot by pioneer Balkan filmmakers the Manakis brothers, who documented simple circa-1900 peasant life. A’s Homeric journey includes flashbacks into past historical events. He travels by taxi to Albania, where he enlists the help of a film archivist (Maia Morgenstern, who plays all four female roles). She joins him on a train ride to Bucharest, Romania. An extensive flashback chronicles A’s childhood under Communism in Bucharest. His next stop is Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, where he is directed to Sarajevo. Angelopoulos mixes scenes shot during the actual Balkan war with historic re-enactments and dreamscapes to examine the role of the artist in political upheaval. ~ Michael Betzold

After pressing the start button (the arrow), click on the “CC” button (framed in red) to choose English, Spanish or Turkish subtitles.