Gigi Gaston, The Black Flower, was a hugely popular and tragic sixties French pop star who in reality never existed. She’s the creation of conceptual artist, and former art director of New York Magazine, Josh Gosfield. He’s done an astonishingly convincing job of documenting a life that never was, through photo-shopped pictures, a mock documentary, a video shot by Jean Luc Godard (not), newsclippings and fictional biographical ephemera.

We see her Gypsy family’s escape from Bulgaria, her affair with her stepbrother, her first guitar, her rise up (and fall down) the charts,  the car crashes, funerals, love triangles and the murder trial. All this played out in a garish media spotlight before the insatiable eyes of her public.

I was initially fooled by Gosfield’s elaborate hoax and went looking for information on the French chanteuse, including checking Amazon for cds, only to discover that I’d been had.

Gosfield has included fictional quotes from icons of the era, including this one by Norman Mailer from a nonexistent Esquire article.

As Norman Mailer wrote, in a 1974 Esquire story:

Could this Black Flower with a voice like Piaf have guessed that when she bloomed into a teenage singing idol for post-war European youth, and later became the Continental fashion icon and sexy French pin-up girl on the bedroom walls of the hippest kids, that the future would strangle her dreams of normalcy, like the protagonists in one her romantically fatalistic songs? No, of course not. Because the characters of Greek tragedies are always the last to know their fates.

Here we a have Gosfield’s perfectly realized faux Jean Luc Godard video and the trailer for the documentary.

Check out Josh’s website and be prepared to be amazed by the depth of detail and work that went into creating his pop fantasy.
 

 
More photos of The Black Flower and the documentary trailer after the jump…
 

Lourdes Vuitton by Francesco de Molfetta
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Casa Louis Vuitton

See more Lourdes Vuitton images over at High Snobiety

(via WOW Report)

 
Thanks Kristian Hoffman !

 
In the mid-1980s Grace Jones’s body became the flesh canvas upon which Keith Haring created some of his most striking images. In the process, Haring contributed to Jones’s reputation as an innovator of cutting edge style and fashion. She wore Haring’s body paint in the video for her song I’m Not Perfect and in live performance at New York City’s Paradise Garage.

Body painting was a natural extension of the ephemeral nature of Haring’s art. Like subway graffiti and street art, it isn’t intended to last.

I remember the days before Haring became famous, when his “Radiant Baby” graffiti was as ubiquitous on the streets of New York as the smell of urine and the sound of ghetto blasters. For awhile, Haring was New York.

In the above photo we see Haring preparing Jones for her role in the 1986 movie Vamp, in which she portrays Katrina the Queen of The Vampires.

The music in this clip from Vamp is by Jonathan Elias who produced Jones’s Bulletproof Heart album.

 
for more photos pull up to the bumper

 
In 1971 Los Angeles television station KTTV refused to air this 60 second commercial for Captain Beefheart’s album Lick My Decals Off, Baby.

Conceived by Beefheart and directed by Larry Secrest and Jon Fizdali, the ad was considered to be ‘crude and unacceptable” by KTTV management. They also deemed the album obscene and refused to air the spot on that basis as well.

The National Association of Broadcasters banned the ad on their member stations, stating the commercial didn’t fit into their standards, which were to…

[...] enlarge the horizons of the viewer, provide him with wholesome entertainment, afford helpful stimulation, and remind him of the responsibilities which the citizen has towards his society.

Beefheart’s record label, Warner/Reprise, stood by the Captain and declared the spot…

[...] really different, it does everything a commercial is supposed to do. It begins with a cigarette flipping through the air in slow motion several times with Beefheart singing ‘Woe-is-a-me-bop.’ There are long silences, Beefheart finally appears doing his famed Hand and Toe Investment. Rockette Morton, one of the guys in Beefheart’s Magic Band, crosses the screen with a black sack over his head working an egg beater. The Captain kicks over a bowl of white paint in slow motion. It is non sequitur stuff that’s funny, attention getting, and pure Beefheart. It’s unfortunate that the station should be so frightened by it.”

In watching the commercial, one has to think that David Lynch had to have seen it at one point in his early development as a filmmaker. It’s a bold and surreal piece of film making that would have certainly baffled and spooked American audiences of the time. It’s still provocative.
 

 
‘One Potato, Two Potato’ was filmed in 1981 by an anonymous Austrian artist and punk rock musician who reputedly went mad during the shoot and killed the actors and hung himself while film was rolling.

Rumors of ‘One Potato, Two Potato’s’ existence flourished within the snuff underground, but no one had actually seen it. The film suddenly surfaced in December of 2008 on eBay and was quickly snapped up by a mysterious Austrian collector of the bizarre and occult.

Dangerous Minds obtained a copy of the video from black market sources in Turkey and after consulting our legal team have decided to share this controversial film with our audience. Viewer discretion is advised.

 
thankyou al bird dirt

Marcocoeloma trispinosum decorator crab with Zoanthus sp. polyps
 
Here’s some absolutely stunning and hypnotic HD videos from a marine art collective called MORPHOLOGIC. It’s true color-pallet-bliss.

MORPHOLOGIC is a scientific art endeavor led by marine biologist Colin Foord and musician Jared McKay. With the aquarium as our primary medium, we explore the artistic possibilities of living coral reef organisms via HD vi and site-specific artworks.

Our laboratory/studio is a state certified aquaculture facility perpetuating marine life within the confines of downtown Miami. Working in conjunction with biologists from the Université de Provence in Marseille, France, we are developing a living genetic database, aquaculture techniques, and biological assays of coral species.

Sit back, relax and let the beauty sooth ya.

 
More marine gorgeousness after the jump…

The speakers of El Dragon
 
As familiar as we are with the Jamaican sound system tradition, it shouldn’t surprise us wherever we find the grass-roots praxis of bumping bass through massive speakers in a non-club setting. Witness for example the pico sound systems of the Colombian port city of Barranquilla off the Caribbean Sea, which like their Jamaican counterparts have been in effect since at least the ‘50s.

People debate the origin of the term pico—is it derived from pick-up trucks that transport the speakers, or from the common practice of picking up the needle on a popular record to start again? But there’s no debate that these systems are a crucial way for underground DJs to break tunes from tons of genres, including cumbia, salsa, calypso, dancehall reggae, soukous, champeta (a Carribean-tinged northern Colombian boogie style), Afrobeat and more.

Plus, any pico worth its salt seems to be obsessive enough about its name and theme that it gets its speakers hand-painted accordingly, with imagery ranging from Camacho Indian hunters to burly combat tanks.

The seven-piece Systema Solar seems to be the savviest group to have emerged from the pico scene—they’ve leveraged their versatility into a touring outfit, and have played throughout Europe and parts of the US. As you’ll see here, they know how to harken back to their roots…
 

 
After the jump: El Gran Fidel, plus the New York-based Dutty Artz crew documents how bananas it gets at a pico dance, complete with speaker-diving and hose-downs from the local fire brigade…
 

 
Over the weekend via that most wonderful invention known as Netflix Instant View I caught an excellent documentary on the making of the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band LP. I found it to be one of the best Lennon related documents I’ve ever seen, worth watching if only for the moments wherein the gloriously raw vocals are isolated, check out the last few minutes of the below clip. Chills up the spine !

 
That they also touch…

 
Dangerous Minds pal Charles Johnson has posted another tasty classic comics cover over at Little Green Footballs. Wait until Glen Beck gets ahold of this, PROOF that Marvel Comics promotes racism or reverse racism or Communism… or something:

Since the New Black Panther Party has been the race-baiting rage lately, here’s a related cover image from the Lizard Collection: issue #52 of Fantastic Four, a classic released in July 1966, an arguably more innocent and open time. This book featured the first appearance of African superhero Black Panther, who would go on to become one of the Avengers. It’s Jack Kirby and Stan Lee at the top of their talents, drawing on 60s memes and cultural icons to create a new, distinct, and very influential form of pop art.