Sticky Fingers: The Stones at the peak of their powers, the catastrophe of Altamont right in their rear-view mirror, “Sister Morphine,” “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar,” an attention-getting album cover with a shot of a man’s crotch and an actual zipper—all of that courtesy of Andy Warhol, of course. In its own way Sticky Fingers is as 60s as anything that ever happened, even if it was released in April 1971.
That zipper would bring its own share of headaches—it made the album impossible to stack easily, leading to lots of scratched returns. Oh, and by the way, the album also featured the first-ever use of the Stones’ tongue logo, designed by John Pasche.
If you want to see a megastar with a relaxed sangfroid that even Kanye West would envy, check out this suave letter to Andy Warhol getting him started on the Sticky Fingers project: “Here’s 2 boxes of material you can use, and the record.” Hilariously, Jagger warns him that extra elements in the cover design may lead to problems down the line, but then emphasizes, “I leave it in your capable hands to do what ever you want” before asking him, in so many words, where the truck should deposit the huge heaping mounds of cash. “A Mr.Al Steckler ... will probably look nervous and say ‘Hurry up’ but take little notice.”
In short, everything any designer would want from a client. World fame, money, creative freedom, and heedless to all consequences.
Just your average (ENORMOUS) sterling silver Vincent Price ring by artist Paul Komoda! Apparently only three of these rings were made. You can get more info about ‘em here.
You can’t swing a dead spirit animal guide in a metaphysical bookstore without hitting stacks and stacks of oracle cards and inspiration cards. Like many things in the last quarter of the twentieth century, such as ambient music, Brian Eno can take partial credit for inventing such cards.
I say partial credit because his famous Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas cards, now available as a free Android and iPhone app or on this website, were predated by Yoko Ono’s instruction cards in the mid-1960’s. Eno and his friend, painter and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt made their Oblique Strategies cards in late 1974. They discovered that they had both been working on similar lists of aphorisms for getting through difficult moments while doing creative work, but from the different paths of music and visual art. They collaborated, combining some of Schmidt’s foundational The Thoughts Behind the Thoughts cards from 1970 and Eno’s own early homemade Oblique Strategies cards.
Eno invented the cards for his own personal use when working under time constraints in a recording studio. They came in handy when working with other artists as a producer, particularly ones who were stressed out in an intimidating studio environment. They are widely respected as one of the tools used by Eno when recording David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of albums in from 1976 to 1978, Low, Heroes, and Lodger.
Eno told Charles Amirkhanian at KPFA in Berkeley in 1980:
The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case—it’s just the most obvious and—apparently—reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt this attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt that attitude.”
The first Oblique Strategy said “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” And, in fact, Peter’s first Oblique Strategy—done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that—was ...I think it was “Was it really a mistake?” which was, of course, much the same kind of message.
The deck’s first edition was privately printed in a limited, numbered and signed edition of 500 in 1974. They fetch over $2000 when they come up for auction now, but it took a decade for that edition to sell out. Software publisher Peter Norton asked Eno for permission to create a new set for him to give away as Christmas presents in 1996.
If you want a physical copy of the new fifth edition, which came out in May, you can buy them for £30.00 (about $47) at Eno’s online shop.
The usefulness of the cards’ brief philosophical shake-ups and kicks in the eye has expanded far beyond the art world. It’s been helpful for anyone needing a fresh perspective in the face of a deadline or under other pressure. Creative blocks can turn into a vicious downward spiral, and the cards are an excellent tool to introduce lateral thinking to break the negative tape loop in one’s head. You knew corporate culture, with its annual retreats and meetings featuring motivational speakers and team-building exercises, would eventually find a use for the Oblique Strategies cards as well. And it has.
Here are ten random card messages:
Discover your formulas and abandon them
What are you really thinking about just now
Use ‘unqualified’ people
Do we need holes?
Think of the radio
The inconsistency principle
Would anybody want it?
Make what’s perfect more human
A very small object - its centre
Listen to the quiet voice
The insights are a bit reminiscent of Zen koans, New Agey affirmations, the I Ching (Schmidt did a series of drawings based on the 64 hexagrams in 1972), and the multitude of inspirational cards available on the market. They aren’t technically oracle cards, since you don’t have to call upon angels, ascended masters, faeries, spirit guides, or other beings of light to use them, but if you believe in a creative muse, that’s exactly what they can be.
Jarvis Cocker discusses the Oblique Strategies cards with Brian Eno in a 2010 BBC Radio 6 interview, below:
Apparently a sound sculpture in a public park in the Netherlands that’s supposed to play delightful sounds of birds was hacked, and now plays the hot-n-heavy sounds of people doin’ the nasty.
According to the YouTube description, the 2009 art installation by Bill Fontana, is located in Enschede and was recently hacked. Passers-by reactions have varied from this is “funny” to this is “evil.”
The city has no idea who is behind the hack.
Is this a clever fake viral video? I do not know. The sound sculpture (with the bird songs) is real, however.
Efforts to create a new, post-capitalist artistic culture are fraught with peril. First of all, the tendency to dismiss pre-socialist traditions (artistic or otherwise) as “bourgeois” inevitably leads to a backlash. The impulse to preserve the past and retain one’s history will always prevail (science fiction Christmas cards in state atheist Soviet Russia immediately come to mind). Secondly, the artistic genres of “communist” states can sway overwhelmingly nationalistic, often at the expense of the art itself; propaganda can be art, but when you live in a totalitarian state, stuff can get stale real quick (then again, certain American gaffs remind me totalitarianism isn’t a prerequisite for banal propaganda). And then there’s that rare example of artistic achievement that falls victim to both of the aforementioned pitfalls—fails at relinquishing ties to capitalist culture and politically problematic in its nationalism—but still reaches the height of brilliance and beauty.
Enter Maoist ballet. As an avid ballet fan and former dancer, I’m slightly offended at the notion that I must reassure readers, “this is no ordinary ballet,” but it is an exceptional interpretation, and those who might otherwise be averse to ballet can take heart that this the style is uniquely dynamic and athletic. China’s Cultural Revolution dictated that the bourgeois culture of capitalism just be replaced with a new proletarian culture- hence the radical choreography and patriotic imagery. Of course, it’s still recognizable as ballet, and while a few Chinese instruments pepper the score, it’s primarily performed by a European-style orchestra.
Below is my favorite, “The Red Detachment of Women,” one of the so-called “Eight Model Operas,” (which were actually five operas, two ballets, and a symphony) all designed and organized by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, intended as the ambitious forefront of China’s new revolutionary culture. Though I tend to watch it in pieces, isolating different acts and numbers for their stand-alone value, the libretto is epic and elaborate. The ballet is actually based on a famous novel that pulled true stories from the all-women Special Company of the 2nd Independent Division of Chinese Red Army, who had over 100 members. When Nixon visited China in 1972 to repair diplomatic relations, this is the ballet they took him to see—there’s no way that wasn’t a backhanded gesture.
In many ways, “The Red Detachment of Women” was a total failure. Even if we ignore the fact that the terrible politics of Communist China were being extolled en pointe, it’s intellectually difficult to argue that anything engineered by Mao’s wife could even be populist. And of course it’s a failure as all cultural revolutions are a failure; art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and no amount of communist shellac could purge the fingerprints of the Western progenitors of ballet. Still, the beauty and the innovation of the project are undeniable, and while “The Red Detachment of Women” wasn’t the dawn of a proletarian artistic movement, it was most certainly, well… revolutionary.
For many years, Yoko Ono was married to Mr. John Lennon, who was one of the chief songwriters for a band called The Beatles. They did some really, really cool shit. If you’re in the dark on that band, or only glancingly familiar, you should really look them up. Somebooksareavailable.
“I thought avant-garde world in New York was still very exciting but that it was starting to become an institution in itself, and there were rules and regulations in an invisible way, and I just wanted to get out of it. I never considered myself a member of any group. I was just doing my own thing, and I’m sure that most artists I knew in those days felt the same.”
Despite her refusenik status, Ono remains Fluxus’ best-known alumnus, and has been as important a figure in the development of American Conceptual Art as John Cage, Chris Burden, or John Baldessari. She initially became known for performances like “Cut Piece,” in which viewers were invited to approach her with scissors as she sat still, cutting off pieces of her clothing until she was entirely naked. Arguably, her most enduring non-musical works are her Instruction pieces - widely disseminated in her now-classic (and pretty much essential) book Grapefruit - participatory/hueristic koan-like invitations for readers to complete artworks in their minds.
Ono’s music career began years before her association with John Lennon. She collaborated with the likes of John Cage and Ornette Coleman in the early ‘60s. It was with Lennon, though, that she began to work within the rock process, and at the same time, he began to bring avant-garde ideas gleaned from Ono to bear in some of The Beatles’ work. Ono’s contributions to both rock and experimental music have long been championed by adventurous musicians starting as early as the Punk and New Wave era (surprising, given the anathema status of The Beatles’ undeniable Summer Of Love associations to Punk’s hippie-hating year zero ethos), a love affair that saw a culmination in the 2007 compilation Yes, I’m A Witch, which saw contemporary artists creating new music beds for a career-spanning selection of Ono’s vocal tracks. Peaches’ update of “Kiss Kiss Kiss” and Cat Power’s “duet” with Ono on “Revelations” are both absolutely stunning.
In 2001, The Japan Society Gallery in NYC hosted an exhibit called YES YOKO ONO, her first American retrospective:
The exhibition explored Ono’s position within the postwar international avant-garde, and her critical and influential role in originating forms of contemporary art, music, film and performance. Featuring approximately 130 works from the 1960s to the present, it presented Ono as a key transmitter of Asian thought to the international art world, through her use of chance and minimalism, and her investigation of everyday life.
The exhibition toured, and its catalogue is an excellent staring point for understanding her career. Currently, an even larger retrospective is touring the museums of Europe, coinciding with Ono’s 80th year.
Fact: if you hate Yoko Ono because “derrr she dun broked up da BEEEEAAAATLES” or because “she don’t even sing or nothin’, she just wails a buncha nonsense,” you’re a useless ass and you need to get your god damn fool eyes off my article right now and go use your valuable Internet time to look at some image macros of funny kittycats. NOW. I’m not even slightly kidding. Go get fitted for a new droolcup. (previous) (previouser). Fuck off, even.
The first iteration of the Plastic Ono Band was comprised of whoeverhappenedtobepresent (including Tommy Smothers!) singing along and clapping their hands at Ono and Lennon’s Montreal “Bed Peace” performance in July of 1969, while the single “Give Peace A Chance” was recorded. The first properly band-like version was assembled in September 1969 for the Toronto Rock And Roll Revival festival, and featured, in addition to Ono and Lennon, future Yes drummer Alan White, noteworthy visual artist and onetime Manfred Mann bassist Klaus Voormann, and one Eric Clapton, who did some other fairly well known stuff himself.
The first Plastic Ono Band studio albums were a matched set of recordings with very nearly identical covers, one under Ono’s name, one under Lennon’s, both credited “and the Plastic Ono Band.” Decent copies of Lennon’s version can be found in thrift stores for pocket change, while Ono’s has become a sought-after collectable.
Ono has been posting a new song from the forthcoming album every week on the Plastic Ono Band’s web site, culminating on Take Me to the Land of Hell being streamable by the release date, September 17, 2013. Check out “Bad Dancer,” featuring Beastie Boys Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz.
Lastly, from just a couple of months ago: whoa, this is cool.
Haring risking arrest to wish New Yorker’s a happy Valentine’s Day
Aired on January 20th, 1990, this French interview was recorded soon before Keith Haring’s death at age 31 from AIDS-related complications. Haring is warm and charismatic throughout, graciously venerating his peers and responding earnestly to questions about his decision to mass market his work.
While Haring’s art has certainly proved lucrative (some of his sweeter images even grace baby bibs nowadays, much of the income going to The Keith Haring Foundation for pediatric AIDS), he was an artist of the people, and originally opened his “Pop Shop” boutique to make his work available to “not only collectors, but kids from the Bronx.” Many critics thought this actually hurt his reputation with “serious” collectors (i.e. big money), since many were less interested in art so easily accessible to the hoi polloi.
In an awkward/endearing moment, the interviewer asks Haring how much his paintings actually sell for, to which Haring replies, “Now it’s ridiculous.” Upon further pressing, Haring says incredulously that some small drawings had recently sold for, ahem, $25,000, each. Apparently all those graffiti fines were actually a sound investment. And so would an investment be in a small Keith Haring original…
At one point during his career—let’s assume rather early on, shall we?—Miami Vice actor Philip Michael Thomas coined the affirmation acronym “EGOT,” which stands for “Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony.” Because he planned to win all four. At the 1984 Academy Awards ceremony, Thomas wore a gold medallion emblazoned with the letters “EGOT.”
So far, Thomas hasn’t been nominated for any of these awards, but he did become the spokesperson for the Psychic Reader’s Network in 1994, claiming that he’d met the world’s top psychics via his world travels. I wonder if he ever asked any of them about his chances for an “EGOT,” the grand slam of showbiz?
In one profile, he compared himself to Gandhi; in another, he claimed that women came up to him and said, “Oh God, I love your thighs, I want you to take me to bed with you!” He bragged about his friends (“Steven Spielberg calls … I get calls from Nancy Reagan … The Queen of England wants me to come over”) and even about boasted about the breadth of his reading (“I read books on philosophy, religion, higher learning, and spaceships”).
Maybe the Queen and Nancy Reagan just loved his thighs? The gold “EGOT” medallion is a pretty Kanye move, right? Well, either Kanye or Tracy Jordan...
Keep reading.
Thomas made an attempt at a musical career, beginning with a 1985 album titled Living The Book of My Life, which he apparently wrote most of the songs for and produced himself. There’s a music video that was made for the single “Just the Way I Planned It” and it’s THE standard-setting stunner of a massive celebrity ego trip—a goldmine of comic hubris—that has remained unmatched since 1985.
Dig the lasers, the “cosmic” THIRD EYE, his face superimposed over the pregnant woman’s belly, the greasy forehead—WHAT THE FUCK was this guy thinking? Obviously it was Thomas himself who came up with the concept here. WHO ELSE POSSIBLY COULD HAVE??? No, it was Thomas himself who was clearly responsible for displaying himself to the world in this manner. No one else would have had… the motivation. Just him, the gold “EGOT” medallion-wearing guy. It was, ahem, just the way he planned it and that’s undeniable! It looks like he choreographed it, too!
From the LP jacket:
Listen to the magical mystical melodies of the universe…calling out your name…moving your soul and spirit through life’s cosmic game…Look deep into the mirror of your soul and discover a wonderful truth…The greatest book you’ll ever know is written and lived by you!
Or in this case, “Tubbs” from Miami Vice.
I originally saw this atrocity exhibition on a Manhattan cable access program called Bad Music Videos that was hosted by Karen Finley and art critic Carlo McCormick, a mid-80s TV show (and nightclub performance) that mocked, well, bad music videos, long before Beavis and Butthead. After I saw it, I wanted, nay, needed to have my own copy and within a few days, a friend of mine at MTV had a 3/4” dub of it messengered over to the video post-production house where I was then working. I made countless crisp VHS copies of this thing. I was an evangelist for its awful awfulness. It never failed to work its magic. Everyone’s jaw dropped when they saw this shit sandwich
Yours will, too.
Forget about that Billy Squire debacle, there is virtually nothing, I repeat, nothing, that’s worse than the Philip Michael Thomas video embedded below. Keep in mind that he wrote the song, produced it and conceptualized and directed this video, too (WHO ELSE would have produced such an epic piece of dreck to glorify the man-god who is PMT???). Thomas is an auteur of such incredible bad taste that he rivals John Waters in that department, with the important distinction that with John Waters, it’s deliberate.
In 1971, the great midcentury photographer Diane Arbus committed suicide at the Westbeth Artists Community in New York City. She was 48 years old. A year later there was a major show of her work at the Venice Biennale. In November 1972 in The New York Times, Hilton Kramer, reporting from the Biennale, confirmed that Arbus had achieved greatness in her work. You can read a full-length article by Kramer about Arbus at Google Books—I’m not sure if it’s identical to the Times piece but it looks to be more or less the same material.
Around the same time an interesting 30-minute documentary about her life and work was produced. The combination of the Biennale success and the documentary served as the full-throated introduction of Arbus’ work to the general public. The documentary is introduced by Arbus’ daughter Doon Arbus, who explains that some of Arbus’ lectures late in her life had been recorded by a student, and we see a montage of Arbus’ photographs while her words resonate over them. Also testifying to the importance of Arbus’ work are Austrian photographer Lisette Model; John Szarkowski, director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art; and American artist Marvin Israel. It was Israel who discovered Arbus’ body after her suicide.
Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. … They made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. … If you’ve ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don’t. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.
Diane Arbus, “A Castle in Disneyland, Cal. 1962”
When Steve Martin was a teenager, he worked at a magic shop on the grounds of Disneyland. This excerpt comes from his 2008 book Born Standing Up:
My final day at the magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contradiction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at a photo of an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and I was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the photo’s breathtakingly romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful.
Lord have mercy! These incredible 12” Blade Runner action figures are something else, aren’t they? Sculptor Scott Pettersen made these gorgeous pieces. Apparently each one takes take two to three months to make. I believe it, too! Just look at the detail in the clothes alone! My mind is simply blown!
“I work in wax when I sculpt and you can get a lot of detail in wax,” Pettersen says of the figures’ faces. “The finished heads are made out of resin — the kind I use is a clear, translucent color, so I cast it in a light color and then build onto that with different flesh tones. With all of them I use airbrush and there’s a lot of blending, a lot of thin, thin layers — I think on mass-produced figures all the paint is opaque and nothing is done with layers so it’s not as realistic.”
Read more about Pettersen’s Blade Runner action figures at Geek Exchange.
, it seems as good a time as any for a big ol’ info-dump. Allons y!
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- participatory/hueristic koan-like invitations for readers to complete artworks in their minds.
is an excellent staring point for understanding her career. Currently, 
nowadays, much of the income going to 
